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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27956849">If You Have Friends, You Have Family, Dammit</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Portioncontrol/pseuds/jeffwik'>jeffwik (Portioncontrol)</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Community (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>By gum we’re going to figure it out if it takes all night, Canon-Compliant, F/F, F/M, Gen, Jeff Winger Gets Therapy (offscreen), One Big House, Pining, Post S6, Put another pot of coffee on, Zootopia - Freeform</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-05-08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-11 00:40:26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>44,604</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27956849</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Portioncontrol/pseuds/jeffwik</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>One by one, they all just fade away. But what if they didn't, though?</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Abed Nadir &amp; Britta Perry, Abed Nadir &amp; Jeff Winger, Annie Edison &amp; Britta Perry, Annie Edison &amp; Jeff Winger, Britta Perry/Frankie Dart/Maybe/Question Mark, Frankie Dart &amp; Britta Perry, Jeff Winger &amp; Mark from Jeff's Old Office, Jeff Winger/Actual Annie Edison, Jeff Winger/Imaginary Annie Edison, Shirley Bennett &amp; Abed Nadir, Shirley Bennett &amp; Annie Edison, Troy Barnes &amp; Abed Nadir, Troy Barnes &amp; Jeff Winger, Troy Barnes/Britta Perry</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>110</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>140</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. They Thought He Was a Goner</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Late September at Greendale was the season of the Fall Formal. The dusty back-to-school posters, with their references to apples, pencils, and slide rules, were down. The dusty Indigenous Peoples’ Day decorations, mostly cribbed from old Thanksgivings and Cowboy Weeks, were up.</p><p>A squad of peppy young people accosted everyone going into or coming out of the cafeteria, pressing fliers into hands and reminding them that good Daylight Savings Awareness meant knowing that Fall Back was only a little more than a month away.  A surprising number of students were already walking around in their Halloween costumes, unless that was just how they dressed all the time. Greendale Young Republicans had their sign-up sheet posted outside the library, but to be fair that wasn't really a seasonal thing, that same sign-up sheet had been hanging there since 2003, increasingly yellowed and with only one name (Heywood Jablome, phone number 867-5309).</p><p>And Troy Barnes returned to campus.</p><p>He hadn't been gone that long, in the grand scheme of things: not quite two years. The experience had aged him, however. He had a slightly ragged beard, and he carried himself a little differently, like he'd lost or perhaps gained weight. He'd spent most of those two years on an island with Levar Burton, a colony of boobies (the birds, don't get excited), and a small group of women who had escaped lives of enslavement by human traffickers only to wind up stranded in the middle of nowhere with nothing but a couple of Americans for company and nothing to eat but an amazing variety of tropical fruits, booby eggs, and very stupid fish.</p><p>"Seriously, you could just pick the fish up with your hands," Troy was telling the first friend he recognized, as they walked down the school hallway. "They were so dumb! It was like, you just saw me pick up your friend, dummy, you don't want to swim away? But hey, more fish for me and Levar and Areum and Nari and Jung and Mandy and Chou and Jessica and Mai and Tam."</p><p>"Sounds cool." Fat Neil — no, no, Neil, just Neil — nodded thoughtfully. "How did you get off the island, though?"</p><p>Troy tsked. "It's silly. We found a cell phone tower and broke it and when people came to fix it we hitched a ride."</p><p>"A cell phone tower?" Neil repeated. "In the middle of the ocean?"</p><p>"It wasn't really a cell phone tower, it just looked like that, listen, man, it's been great to see you but you know where Abed is, this time of day?" Troy had tried the apartment first, but there was nobody there.</p><p>Neil stammered a little. "Uh…I really couldn't say, man."</p><p>"Okay, okay. Didn't mean to put you on the spot." Troy could tell the question flustered Neil. Maybe he and Abed'd had a falling out in the last two years? Some <em> Dungeons &amp; Dragons </em> tiff. "I'll head into the cafeteria, see if Shirley's at her sandwich counter. Or, no…" Troy checked his watch. "Cafeteria's closed. Ugh, this is hard. I should ask Annie. Where's Annie gonna be?"</p><p>Neil blinked in confusion.</p><p>"I'm kidding you man, I know, I know." Troy grinned and clapped Neil briefly on the shoulder. "She's probably in Jeff's office. That's still in the same place, right?"</p><p>"Uh, yeah," Neil said slowly.</p><p>"You want to come with, or you got someplace you need to be?" </p><p>"Yeah, no." Neil looked at Troy, then away, down the hall. "Listen, I gotta get to class. Tell Jeff I said hi, okay?"</p><p>"You bet, man." Troy flashed a smile that made Neil feel, however briefly, that surely all would be right with the world soon.</p>
<hr/><p>Jeff sat in his office and stared at the pile of papers on his desk. They were fifteen-hundred-word essays on, shit, he didn't even remember. The first essay assignment of the semester for the junior-level "Introduction to Constitutional Law" class he was teaching. Con Law was supposed to be the fun one, the one where the cases had some kind of marginal relationship to the political issues people cared about. He'd agreed to teach it the spring before, during one of the narrow windows where he didn't feel like a frog boiling in self-hatred.</p><p>He remembered telling Annie about it. He remembered how she flashed a smile, pleased on his behalf, and then she'd warned him that he needed to step up his game for an upper-level class. That he couldn't just play the class an endless stream of <em> Schoolhouse Rock </em> and documentaries about the 1960s. And he’d asked if she would check in on him, and if so would she kindly let him know in advance, just so he could be sure to put away the creaky VCR on those days. And she’d rolled her eyes a little and shaken her head and told him he didn’t need her riding him all the time, and...</p><p>He remembered thinking, when he wrote the syllabus and included the short essay assignments, that Annie would probably be willing to help him grade them. He remembered looking forward to that, anticipating a renewal of the old times, if only for one evening. Working together on a project again, however briefly. But now she was gone. Jeff was going to have to read nineteen essays on whether <em> Brown v Kansas Board of Education </em> was a good Supreme Court decision or the best Supreme Court decision, and he was going to have to do it alone.</p><p><em> Oh, whine whine whine, Patsy Cline </em> . <em> Hey, remember how we used to do that? With the names? </em> He could imagine her, feet up on the couch, arms folded, that familiar mix of amusement and irritation on her face. <em> You know you can do it. </em></p><p>He could, of course. He would. He would, and it wouldn’t be the worst experience of the week, it would just be more boring and less fun than it might have been.</p><p><em> Lots of things are more boring than they might have been. Lots of things are less fun. Sometimes stuff doesn’t go the way we wish it did. </em> The Annie he imagined shrugged. <em> You’ll be fine. </em></p><p>“Yeah, yeah, I know,” he said aloud to the empty couch.</p><p>“Know what?”</p><p>Jeff scowled. For a moment he thought that Imaginary Annie had recruited an Imaginary Troy, the better to underline how old and used-up and worthless Jeff was. But then he squinted at the figure in the doorway of his office and saw: it was actual Troy, and he was actually there.</p><p>“Troy!” Jeff was up on his feet before he knew it. “What are you—is anybody with you? Abed? Where have you been, what are you…” He trailed off, shaking his head. There were too many questions. “Troy,” he said again, and embraced his friend.</p><p>“Hi, Jeff,” Troy said as he hugged him back. “I just got back in the country. I wanted to surprise everybody.”</p><p>“Well, come in! Sit down!” Jeff took a step back and gestured to the couch. “Can I get you a drink?” He pulled open the big lower drawer on his desk, the one with the bottles. “Scotch? Bourbon, gin and tonic, vodka… I can run to the cafeteria, get some orange juice for a mixer…”</p><p>Troy looked concerned as he sat down in the spot recently vacated by Imaginary Annie. “It’s what, nine thirty in the morning?”</p><p>“Right, yes, of course.” Jeff closed the drawer again and ignored the flush of  embarrassment. “Does Britta know you’re—have you seen Britta? I can call her.”</p><p>“Uh, sure, man, I’d love to see Britta…. and everybody.” Troy leaned forward. “Why do you say Britta, specifically? Like, not Abed or Annie or Shirley, but Britta? Is she—did I—I didn’t get her pregnant before I left, did I?” Jeff would have thought he was joking, but Troy seemed to be wholly in earnest.</p><p>So instead he did a double take. “What?”</p><p>“I mean, she said she was protected but you know she’d Britta her birth control… It was just a couple three times, that would have been January of last year…” Troy squinted with the effort of doing math. “So, Baby Chewbacca would be, wow, like a year old now...“</p><p>“Chewbacca? What? Never mind. Britta did not have your baby,” Jeff assured him. His phone was in his hand. “Or anyone’s.”</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>JEFF to BRITTA</b>
</p><p>
  <em> Come to my office NOW </em>
</p><p> </p><p>“Cool, yeah.” Troy seemed almost disappointed. “Okay, so what’s her situation? She’s got another crap boyfriend and needs us to intervention her and y’all didn’t want to do it without me?”</p><p>“Uh, no. No.” Jeff glanced up from his phone. “She’s single. She's doing…she’s doing great, actually. I mean, she’s on track to graduate in the spring. I think. Then there’s some kind of work requirement to get fully certified but she’s got a plan for that, too.”</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>BRITTA to JEFF</b>
</p><p>
  <em> Your not the boss of me </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>JEFF to BRITTA</b>
</p><p>
  <em> [fire emoji][fire emoji][fire emoji][fire emoji]NOW!!![alarm emoji][alarm emoji] </em>
</p><p> </p><p>“Really? That’s great!” Troy looked genuinely pleased. “I knew she could.”</p><p>"She's on track, she hasn't done it yet," Jeff warned him.</p><p>"Still!"</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>BRITTA to JEFF</b>
</p><p>
  <em> Dramatic mulch? </em>
</p><p>
  <em> b their n 5min </em>
</p><p> </p><p>“She’s on her way,” Jeff told Troy. “I didn’t tell her it was you, it’ll be a surprise.”</p><p>“Awesome.” Troy grinned. Seeing Troy grin was weirdly therapeutic, even cathartic. Jeff suddenly felt like sobbing. “So,” Troy asked, “how’s everybody else?”</p>
<hr/><p>“Damn, man.”</p><p>"I know," Jeff said, his voice almost cracking. "Right?"</p><p>They were seated next to one another on the couch, now. Troy threw an arm around Jeff, a comradely gesture that was itself almost too much for him to bear.</p><p>"So Abed's gone." Troy mulled this over, seemed to decide it wasn't a problem to solve immediately. "Shirley's gone, and Annie...you haven't talked to her since she told you she wasn't coming back, and she hasn't been calling you… No wonder you're a wreck." Troy glanced at him, then turned and focused his attention on the rear wall of Jeff's office.</p><p>"No, no, don't spare my feelings," Jeff mumbled.</p><p>"See, if you weren't a wreck you'd have had like six witty retorts for that." Troy shook his head and sighed.</p><p>"Okay, yeah. Yeah." Jeff swallowed. He pushed away the urge to get up and pour himself a drink.</p><p>"I remember when I left, you two… it looked like you guys were figuring something out."</p><p>"Well, I ran out of chances."</p><p>"Yeah, yeah you did. But listen, it's gonna be okay, you hear me?" Troy turned and stared at Jeff until Jeff met his gaze. "I used to know this real smart guy. He made a bunch of speeches. I tuned most of them out, but I remember one time he told me he wished he had the courage to commit to a relationship. He said I put myself out there and I tried, and I owned how I felt, and that's what made me a man, a better man than him probably…"</p><p>Jeff had made dozens of speeches over the years but he remembered the one Troy meant. "I thought I gave that speech to Abed in Troy's body."</p><p>Troy shrugged. "He must have told me about it after."</p><p>"So you're saying," Jeff said slowly, "that I should be a man, admit how I'm feeling, start working on climbing out of this hole, by which I mean this community college…"</p><p>"Basically." Troy was nodding now. "You know, basic human being stuff. Go Human Beings!"</p><p>On the one hand, this was some basic Hallmark-card-level puerile advice, and Jeff should know; he was an expert on passing out superficial pablum. On the other hand, coming from Troy it sounded like wisdom, and Jeff hadn't heard anybody tell him he should take care of himself since…it had been too long.</p><p>As he tried to put his thoughts in some kind of order, he heard his office door slam. Jeff and Troy both turned to look as Britta entered, holding a mug of coffee that no doubt was the cause of her delayed arrival.</p><p>"All right, Winger, what's so—" </p><p>The mug broke when it hit the ground.</p>
<hr/><p>A week later Troy sat at what had once been his dining table as he tried to explain himself.</p><p>"The thing about money," he said. "I mean, the thing about capitalism…"</p><p>Britta sat across from him. She stirred her coffee and watched the clouds form and spread and fade. "I know! I know. You're rich. You can afford all kinds of things."</p><p>"It's not just... " Troy frowned and shook his head. "The thing about money is, when you have a lot of it, they give you more. You don't do anything, you just—boom, more money. Like, you remember Pierce's will? He left me fourteen million dollars."</p><p>The third person at the table cleared her throat. "I'm sorry, excuse me, what?"</p><p>"I told you about that," Britta said to Frankie. "With the lie detectors and the sperm and…" She gestured, and almost spilled her coffee. "Annie has a key to Jeff's place. Had, I guess."</p><p>Frankie stared at her. "You did not mention fourteen million dollars. I would have remembered fourteen million dollars."</p><p>Troy raised his hands, to try to stave off an argument. "Okay, it's not—it's not fourteen million dollars. That figure...so, there was a bunch of shares of Hawthorne Wipes, and it was valued at that by, uh, some value-guessing guy?"</p><p>"A valuation specialist?" Frankie guessed.</p><p>"Is that a thing?" Britta asked. Frankie nodded to her. "Huh."</p><p>"Well, while I was lost at sea, the board of Hawthorne decided to sell to Johnson &amp; Johnson," Troy continued.</p><p>Frankie raised her hand. "I'm sorry, I don't mean to interrupt, and really this is all fascinating, but, did you say 'lost at sea?'"</p><p>"I told you about that, too!" Britta protested.</p><p>"You did not!"</p><p>"I definitely did."</p><p>"I may…" Frankie rubbed her jaw. "I may have heard 'lost at sea' and assumed you were engaging in colorful metaphor. If you'd asked me yesterday where he had been, I would have said Troy went backpacking across Asia to find himself."</p><p>Troy perked up. "Asia, really? Which part? It's a big continent."</p><p>Frankie shrugged.</p><p>"You know China is <em> in </em> Asia? That's how big Asia is! Big enough to hold China <em> and </em> India!"</p><p>"I didn't have a specific part of Asia in mind," Frankie admitted.</p><p>"Korea," Troy suggested.</p><p>"What about--okay, sure. Korea." Frankie tried to exchange a <em> what is he even talking about? </em> type of glance with Britta, but Britta was sipping her coffee and seemed to find Troy's words wholly comprehensible.</p><p>"Anyway. I was talking about Hawthorne Wipes. Apparently they wanted to do this merger with Johnson &amp; Johnson for a long time but Pierce's dad blocked the sale. Then Jeff killed him—"</p><p>"I don't mean to keep interrupting," Frankie interrupted, "but—"</p><p>"Pierce's dad," Troy explained. "Not Pierce. Jeff didn't kill Pierce. There was a whole thing with a lie detector about that. No charges got filed."</p><p>Britta nodded. "I told you!"</p><p>"I…you…okay." Frankie leaned back. "You know what? I'm going to get another cup of coffee. I'll still be able to hear you, I can participate in the conversation, I'm just going to get up and take a couple of steps over to the kitchen, where Britta's coffeemaker is—"</p><p>"That's actually Troy's coffeemaker," Britta said quickly.</p><p>"Oh, you can have it," Troy said.</p><p>"Really?" Britta smiled shyly. "Thanks."</p><p>"Ain't no thing." Troy grinned. "Something to remember me by."</p><p>"Mmm, I don't need a coffeemaker to—"</p><p>"And I'm back," Frankie said, sitting down. She wished somebody else were there — Elroy, Craig, <em> anybody </em> — for her to exchange <em> what is up with these two? </em> expressions with. "You were telling us a thrilling tale of corporate mergers and acquisitions."</p><p>"Yeah? Yeah, I was." Troy drummed his fingers on the table in front of him. "So Johnson &amp; Johnson bought Hawthorne Wipes, I didn't know about it but the proxies all approved, they waited until Pierce was dead to do it. The deal was…so, to make a long story short, I own twenty million dollars' worth of Johnson &amp; Johnson stock now. Actually, though? I don't."</p><p>"Ah," Frankie sighed, relieved that this story was going to end up someplace where Troy wasn't a multimillionaire. "There's always a catch."</p><p>"The finance guys want to justify having jobs, is how it was explained to me," Troy continued. "So while I was in Fiji—actually, it was <em> near </em> Fiji…never mind. While I was lost at sea with Levar Burton—"</p><p>Frankie's hand shot up again. She forced herself to lower it, because otherwise this story would never end.</p><p>"You okay?" Troy asked her. When she nodded, he continued. "While I was lost at sea they diversified my portfolio, which is this thing you have to do to avoid paying taxes or something…"</p><p>Frankie bit her lip, determined not to interrupt.</p><p>"So it's more like twenty million dollars' worth of, uh, financial instruments, with a ten percent annual rate of return."</p><p>There was a pregnant pause. Britta tried to guess what twenty million dollars with a ten percent rate of return actually meant. "Capitalism is a fundamentally broken system," she said quietly.</p><p>"Have you considered donating to Greendale Community College's endowment?" Frankie asked. "Probably not, because we don't have one, but I could set something up—"</p><p>Britta's coffee mug clattered when it hit the tabletop, but it didn't break, at least. "You made six million dollars for being lost at sea?"</p><p>"Yeah. I mean, what I was doing didn't really have anything to do with it, I could have been taking classes here and it still would have—"</p><p>"You made<em> six million dollars for being lost at sea</em>!" Britta stared at Troy, wide-eyed. Visceral attraction fought visceral disgust. "We're enemies now," she whispered.</p><p>"You know, those glasses make you look really hot and smart," Troy said.</p><p>"Class enemies." Britta shuddered. "Don't say something charming about Spanish class," she warned Troy. "Don't you dare!"</p><p>"Aw, Britta." Troy looked heartbroken. "Don't be like that."</p><p>"I was <em> homeless</em>! Through no fault of my own!"</p><p>"Maybe a <em> little </em> fault," Frankie murmured, mostly to herself.</p><p>Britta made a noise somewhere between a bitter laugh and an angry huff. "And you were living it up in Fiji with a dozen sex slaves?"</p><p>Frankie opened her mouth to ask a question, then closed it again. Every answer just led to further questions.</p><p>"And that's a <em> really </em> misogynistic way to frame those poor women's experiences!"</p><p>"I never—<em>you </em> just said—they're living in a group home in Singapore now, taking classes to become dental hygienists!  Which is what they decided they wanted! I got them all set up!"</p><p>"You—” Britta softened. “Really?" </p><p>Troy nodded. "And listen, you don't need to tell me that I don't deserve twenty million dollars. I mean, maybe I do, because I'm awesome, but you're awesome too and you don't have twenty million dollars, so it's messed up that I have it and you don't. Lots of people deserve twenty million dollars and don't have it."</p><p>Britta nodded. "Abed, Shirley, Frankie here…" She turned to Frankie, a thought occurring to her for the first time. "You don't already have twenty million dollars too, do you?"</p><p>Frankie smiled at her, the way you did when someone you cared about made a joke that wasn't particularly funny. Then the smile faded. "...No."</p><p>"Well, Troy does," Britta retorted, visibly embarrassed. "It didn't seem<em> that</em> impossible."</p><p>"So I want to use the money to help people," Troy continued. "Food banks, women's shelters, I figure we can help a lot of people. A couple of million dollars a year is a drop in the bucket nationally, but it could make a difference here in Greendale."</p><p>Britta took a deep breath. "Okay," she said slowly. "I guess I can provisionally suspend judgement…"</p><p>"I also inherited Pierce's house, the mansion? It's been empty for like two years and it wasn't in great shape then, so, I'm getting it renovated. You're welcome to stay there. It's a big house," Troy added quickly. "There's gonna be like nine bedrooms. It'd be a waste if it was just me."</p><p>"Wow, uh…" Britta was somewhat taken aback. "I don't know. Is Abed going to be moving in with you, I guess?"</p><p>"Yeah, well, I haven't talked to Abed yet. It's kind of a lot to drop on him at once—"</p><p>"Yeah!" Britta laughed. "This is a lot, Troy!"</p><p>"It is," agreed Frankie, because she wanted to participate in the conversation.</p><p>"Well, think about it," Troy said. "The house won't be ready for a while anyways. Not till next year probably. In the meantime, though, don't worry about rent. I got that covered."</p><p>Britta shook her head. "Troy, I can't accept—"</p><p>"Britta accepts," Frankie interrupted. "Britta, don't argue with me, I've seen your bank statements. Take his rent money."</p><p>"I don't know…"</p><p>"Britta, please." Troy looked at her with his big brown eyes. "You were homeless and I made six million dollars sipping mango juice." Much of Troy's pirate adventure had been a harrowing ordeal, actually, but that wasn't worth going into just then. "I can pay your rent or I can buy the company that owns this building and let you live here rent-free, and if I have to do it that way then it'll tie up a lot of assets because big apartment buildings like this aren't cheap."</p><p>If it had just been one or the other of them pressuring her, Britta might not have waffled, but Troy and Frankie both? They were coming at her from both sides with dangerously sexy confidence. "Fine."</p><p>Troy relaxed in his seat, relieved. "Cool. I'm glad we got that settled." He smiled at her, and she smiled at him and Frankie almost felt like a third wheel. "Now, on to due business. That's a business term," he explained, "the business that's due to be talked about?"</p><p>"Okay," Frankie said carefully.</p><p>"I'm going to need help figuring out how to help people," Troy said. "You're one of the smartest people I know."</p><p>"Oh, Troy, that's very sweet," Frankie said, pleased. "But we just met earlier today, so…oh, you meant Britta. You meant Britta?"</p><p>"Britta, Jeff too, and I guess if you want to help..." Troy leaned back in his seat. "I mean, the three of us will probably have it, but y'know, it'll be fun. The more the merrier."</p><p> </p><p>NEXT: TROY TALKS TO ABED! JEFF TALKS TO ANNIE! ONE CONVERSATION GOES SIGNIFICANTLY BETTER THAN THE OTHER!</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>But the cat came back,<br/>The very next day.<br/>The cat came back!<br/>They thought he was a goner,<br/>But the cat came back,<br/>He just couldn't stay away.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. One is Silver</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em>Mmm, I don't know. Seems iffy.</em>
</p><p>Sometimes when Jeff felt…not lonely, exactly, just tired of being by himself in his apartment…he would get in his car and drive away. For an hour, sometimes a little more, he'd weigh his options. Turn around, or just keep going? Back to the suffocating nest that was Greendale, or out into the wider world full of cold uncaring strangers for him to meet, befriend, disappoint?</p><p>
  <em> You spend too much time by yourself. Some people thrive in solitude but you end up talking to yourself and not liking what you have to say. </em>
</p><p>The day Annie told him she wasn't going to be coming back to Greendale at the end of her internship, that she wasn't sure when she'd be back, that day he almost did it. He got as far as holding his phone and staring at the contact information for his old friend Mark. Odds were Mark would have been willing to toss him some career scraps. But something had stopped him. </p><p>
  <em> Obviously I'd love to hear from you, but I'm trying to live my life, here. Well, there. You know. You get it. </em>
</p><p>Maybe the sun had been too bright. Maybe he'd been a little hungry, or a little tired. Maybe he was a miserable worthless sad sack and he didn't want Mark, who probably remembered him as a borderline-superhuman hero lawyer, to see him in his reduced state.</p><p>
  <em> And see, this? This is what I'm talking about. When I say 'iffy.' ‘Wah wah I'm old and Annie eventually gave up on me, poor worthless me!’ That's what you sound like. </em>
</p><p>That had been weeks...almost two months ago now. Sometimes he still imagined Annie was there with him, cheerily riding shotgun in his eight-year-old Lexus, telling him the sort of things she used to say.</p><p><em> You're going to be fine without me, you know </em>.</p><p>Stuff like that.</p><p>When he got to Cheyenne, across the state line, he had to stop for gas. He’d never been out of Colorado before, but crossing the border didn’t feel like much of an accomplishment, under the circumstances. Driving aimlessly was still a better plan than the alternative, though, because it gave him a reason not to drink.</p><p><em> That's the kind of thing that worries me. That right there. You don't need a reason to not drink. You should need a reason </em> to <em> drink. I was in NA for a while, remember? I bounced right back from the whole pill addiction thing, you'd never know to look at me that I'd ever been in recovery, so you should probably listen to me when I tell you things like that. </em></p><p>He could call her.</p><p>
  <em> Sure! You want me to be your addiction guru? I bet I'm full of peppy aphorisms. 'Take it one day at a time.' 'Your best thinking got you here.' All that stuff. </em>
</p><p>Maybe not.</p><p>
  <em> I'd pick up. Unless I'm at a Halloween party or something. I'm sure I'd love to hear from you. I probably miss you at least like one percent of how much you miss me, so, I’d probably be overjoyed to hear from you. Just, remember, I'm not your love-slave, okay? I have to do what's best for me, and what's best for me involves not being in the same time zone as you. </em>
</p><p>He could, though. Just call her, say hi. Maybe apologize for the way their last conversation ended.</p><p>
  <em> Yeah, that wasn't your finest hour. You were upset, though. Probably it didn't do anything but vindicate the decision I'd already made. It was like you were telling me I was right! Even though that was the exact opposite of the words you were using. </em>
</p><p>Jeff turned the car around and drove back south to Greendale. He didn't call her, or anyone.</p><p>
  <em> That's probably for the best. What's your best-case scenario? I come back to visit long enough for some pity sex? You seduce me into abandoning all my aspirations and then I return to Greendale to become a teacher like you? I mean, you might be able to manage that. You’ve talked me into things before. </em>
</p><p>It wasn't like she couldn't have called or texted him, either. It wasn't like he was obsessively checking or anything, but he knew their text exchanges had ended with one from him to her, the morning before their last call, just a quick little hello she'd never responded to.</p><p><em> Are you sure that wouldn't be the </em> <b> <em>worst</em></b><em>-case scenario, though? Convincing me to come back and stay with you? Because I'm not. Maybe it would be good for you. Not for me. </em></p><p>Once out on the highway he put the radio on a station he hated and turned it up, loud.</p>
<hr/><p><br/>
While the renovations to Hawthorne Manor continued apace, Troy was staying in the pool house. It was a little outbuilding, with a couple of bedrooms and what was currently the nicest bathroom on the estate, but it had only a little half kitchen. Just a wet bar, really. Troy guessed it was called a “pool house” because of the space for a pool or billiards table in the large living area. The living area also had big windows with a view of the Olympic swimming pool that sat between this house and the main building.</p><p>Late October, the pool was drained and covered, of course. Like the rest of the estate, it was decades out of date and hadn’t been maintained for the last couple of years. Stupidly enormous swimming pools had been the fashion for rich people's houses, at some point. (Maybe this was a 'pool house' because it was about the same area as the pool.) Troy had decided to punt on whether to restore the Olympic pool, fill it in and set up a flower garden or something in the space, or to rip it all out and replace it with a smaller pool on a saltwater system. It was like the seventh or eighth most pressing update Hawthorne Manor needed.</p><p>Reaching out through the Greendale Community College Air Conditioning Repair Annex alumni network had been the way to go, finding contractors. Everything was on time and at budget. By Christmas the mansion would be ready for occupancy. Except that it would be mostly devoid of furniture and all the walls would be the same dull beige...but he had a plan for that, too.</p><p>One thing at a time. Today was the day he was going to do a thing he’d been putting off for way too long. He was a little nervous about it, to tell the truth. He hadn’t seen Abed in two years, hadn’t spoken with him in eighteen months. Since then he’d been on a pirate adventure and a desert-island adventure and a discovering-he-had-even-more-money-than-he’d-thought-he-had adventure. Troy was different. Abed would be, too. Probably.</p><p>He took a deep breath, and tapped one key on the laptop in front of him. In the FaceTime window, while it waited for Abed to connect, Troy could see himself. Shaggier than he used to be. He’d considered shaving for the occasion but a ragged beard seemed on theme.</p><p>“Come in, Inspector! Come in, Inspector!” Troy barked the instant the connection started. He hadn’t practiced his fake English accent for years and it frankly had never been that great but hopefully it would get the job done.</p><p>Abed looked exactly the same as he always had.</p><p>When he didn’t respond immediately, Troy pushed ahead. “This is Reggie, Inspector! Come in, Inspector!”</p><p>Abed blinked, and then his eyes narrowed. “Reggie?” he repeated in an approximation of Inspector Spacetime’s BBC Received-Pronunciation accent. “Constable Reggie? Is that you?”</p><p>“Gosh, yes, Inspector!” Troy grinned. “Gosh, it’s good to see you. I didn’t think I ever would again, not when I was at the bottom of the Paradox Planet’s Parallax Prism Prison Pit!”</p><p>“The pit? You mean, you were trapped in the prisms? Good heavens, Reggie.” Abed—the Inspector—sounded faintly scandalized. “I had no idea. When you didn’t come back from your trip to Queen Erotissia’s Carnal Court I assumed you had settled into a happy retirement. Let that be a lesson, Reggie. One should never assume.” Abed sighed. “However did you escape?”</p><p>“One might say I got a little help from a special guest star,” Troy replied. “An American television actor, late twentieth century.”</p><p>Abed raised one eyebrow. “Ted Danson? You know he and I have a history, Reggie.”</p><p>Troy shook his head no. “Levar Burton! As fine a chap as any I’ve ever had at my back…present company excluded, Inspector!” He shrugged, as if to convey that this was merely a minor detail. “I know you’ve been having adventures on your own, without me, for quite some time, Inspector—“</p><p>“Reggie,” Abed said in a tone of gentle remonstrance. “I think you mean ‘quite some space’.”</p><p>“Of course, Inspector.” Troy nodded, accepting the correction. “In any case, do you think the BOOTH has room for…one more?”</p><p>“Always room for one more, Reggie. Always room for one more.” Abed smiled serenely.</p><p>Troy smiled back. “It’s good to see you again, Inspector.”</p><p>“And you. But there will be space enough for pleasantries another...space.”</p><p>“Right you are, Inspector!”</p><p>“Now, to business. Is Levar with you now, Reggie? Are you on Earth, or are you still on the Paradox Planet?”</p><p>“I’ve secured a new base of operations, Inspector. It’s…” Troy trailed off.</p><p>Abed stared at him a moment.</p><p>When Troy spoke again, it was in a normal tone of voice. “I’m sorry, man, I should have written it down. I had a thing for the mansion, I forgot it.”</p><p>“<em>Inspector Spacetime </em> has had seven adventures set at least partially in mansions,” Abed replied, dropping the accent. “Most were filmed on location at the Portmeirion resort in Wales. Is that where you are?”</p><p>“No, no.” Troy shook his head. “I’m back home. In the States. Colorado. Greendale… I’m at Pierce’s old house! My house, now. I inherited it.”</p><p>There was a slight pause, which Troy read as the equivalent of Abed doing a wide-eyed double take. “Congratulations. Were you saying you wanted me to come get you? I don’t have a car and, just to remind you, the BOOTH isn’t real. <em> Inspector Spacetime </em> is make-believe.”</p><p>Troy shrugged. “I had the thing I was going to say, about how Reggie was injected with homing pigeon biodata during the Third World War One, but then I forgot—Madame Clarinet’s! That’s what I was going to say. I’m at Madame Clarinet’s.”</p><p>Abed nodded sagely. “Yes. I would have understood that to mean you were at Pierce’s house.”</p><p>“So…” Troy felt like there were a thousand things to say but in the moment none of them quite seemed good enough. “You’re in LA now, huh?”</p><p>“Yes. I came out to work on a television series that got cancelled before any of the episodes aired.”</p><p>“Aw, man, that’s disappointing. Jeff told me a little about it, it sounded like it was just your kind of thing.”</p><p>“Yes. My kind of thing is not popular with streaming platform tastemakers. But I was able to use it as a stepping stone to work as crew on a reality show where heiresses redecorate one another’s yachts.”</p><p>“Oh.” Troy tried to react to that, but drew a blank. “Neat, I guess.”</p><p>“It is what it is,” Abed said with a slightly curt shake of his head. “Episodes I’ve worked on are airing now but they don’t meaningfully reflect any creative input on my part so you don’t need to watch them. My girlfriend dumped me.”</p><p>“Dang.” Troy wished he’d returned from his implausible pirate adventures sooner; Abed had plainly been lost without him. “You had a girlfriend?”</p><p>“I did. Her name was Rachel.” Abed’s tone was still flat but Troy could see this was a sore subject. “Probably her name is still Rachel, but what she calls herself now is no longer relevant to me.”</p><p>“I’m sorry, man.”</p><p>Abed glanced away briefly. “It’s okay,” he said. “It happened almost a year ago. Before I moved out here.”</p><p>“Right, right. So…LA. Is it cool? Have you met any cool people? Or famous people? Or, like, the ideal case, famous cool people, like Keanu Reeves or Halle Berry?”</p><p>Abed shook his head no. “It’s a very large city, and the cool slash famous people are concentrated in areas I don’t frequent.”</p><p>“Do you even…?” Troy trailed off.</p><p>“I don’t really have time for it the way I used to. At the end of the day I’m too tired to do more than watch six or seven episodes of old sitcoms and update my wiki with notes on those episodes.”</p><p>“Dang, man.”</p><p>“It probably sounds grimmer than it is,” Abed said matter-of-factly. “If I didn’t feel I was making progress towards my goals, I would leave LA, return to Greendale, and work part-time in my father’s falafel kitchen while making no-budget personal content on the side. Put it on YouTube.”</p><p>“YouTube’s still a thing?” Troy was surprised. He’d assumed it was a flash in the pan whose time had ended while he was in technically-not-Fiji.</p><p>“Yes. Can we go back to Inspector Spacetime and Constable Reggie again? I was enjoying that.”</p><p>“Sure, sure…I mean, no, hold on. I don’t think I can reframe what I wanna say as <em> Inspector Spacetime </em> references.”</p><p>“I bet you could,” Abed replied. “But you’re the one who was lost at sea, so whatever you want.”</p><p>“Great, perfect opening. What I want is for you to quit your heiress-wrangling job—“</p><p>“The heiress-wranglers are union, I’m just a yacht-flange grip boy.”</p><p>“I was gonna say I don’t think it was worth it, interrupting me for that correction, but okay, I admit it, I’m impressed you made it to yacht-flange grip in barely one production season. But anyway. Quit your job, come back here.”</p><p>“I’m just a grip boy, not a full grip.”</p><p>“Quit your job, come back here,” Troy repeated.</p><p>”It was a simpler time," Abed said. "You and me and Annie, all in the apartment together. You want to go back to our apartment?” From Abed’s tone, this was not a no. “Is Annie coming home, too?”</p><p>“I haven’t talked to Annie but from what I hear she’s doing great in DC. And Britta’s in our old apartment, right now...I want you to move in with me. Live in Pierce’s house. It’s huge,” he quickly pointed out. “You remember. And I’m getting it totally renovated.”</p><p>“What are you even doing in Greendale? You could go anywhere. More than once I’ve imagined that you might come back and move here.”</p><p>Troy scoffed. “Before the pirate thing, and after the desert island thing, I’ve seen enough of the big-city life to know it’s not what I wanna be doing. Greendale is where our friends are. Jeff and Britta, I mean. And the dean, I guess. Annie and Shirley are gone, but they’re more likely to come back to Greendale than they are to just up and move to LA, so if we want to see them...”</p><p>“Are you sleeping with Britta?” Abed asked.</p><p>Troy straightened up, and reflexively looked around to confirm he was alone and nobody heard that. “Abed! No!”</p><p>“Do you want me to move in with you as a gambit to help you convince Britta to move in with you, too, hoping that the proximity will lead to a relationship? If you need me to do that, I will.”</p><p>“Abed, man.” Troy wiped his suddenly-sweaty brow. “Man, Abed...”</p><p>“Unless something’s changed recently, Britta’s extremely available,” Abed said. “Her only relationship of even borderline significance, since dating you for a year, has been with Subway Sandwiches. Who was also Honda Motors.”</p><p>“Yeah?” Troy scooted a little forward in his seat. “I mean, we’ve been hanging out. Some.”</p><p>“And maybe Frankie,” Abed added as if Troy hadn’t spoken. “Frankie and I exchange emails regularly. You must have asked her not to mention you or she would have. I think they’re just friends but I’m not sure. Britta gets along with her better than she ever did with Annie or Shirley. Frankie’s been after her to get high less and it’s been working, according to my sources. Which are Frankie.”</p><p>“I don’t think I’d have to worry about Frankie,” Troy said. “I mean, if I was in a position to worry about her. Which I’m not.”</p><p>“There’s no need to worry. Frankie can take care of herself,” Abed agreed. "Frankie thinks Britta is doing well, and Jeff is about the same. Which means he's not doing great."</p><p>“Right. Yeah. Jeff's having some trouble. All the more reason, right? Anyway.” Troy cleared his throat. ”We can do <em> Troy and Abed Making Content </em> here. In the mansion, there’s going to be plenty of space.”</p><p>“It might be harder to forge industry connections from Greendale,” Abed said. “But in today’s rapidly changing media environment, who can say with certainty that LA will even continue to be the entertainment capital of the world? And content can go online from anywhere. I'm in. Can we go back to doing <em>Inspector Spacetime</em> again, now?”</p>
<hr/><p>Friday night, the evening before Halloween, and everybody with even a hint of a social life was out at a party. The drab office building where Annie worked (for now) was emptied of civil servants, federal agents, and ancillary law enforcement accessories. Except one.</p><p>Annie was tired, but she was tired all the time. The other junior people she saw around her, they didn't seem tired all the time. They came in later than she did and left earlier. They spent a lot of their workday talking about television shows they'd watched, or hadn't watched but meant to, or would never under any circumstances watch except ironically.</p><p>But somehow they hit all their targets and it was Annie who had to work late, Annie who had to beg off going to her not-quite-a-boyfriend-yet's roommate's girlfriend's party to catch up on end-of-month stuff, Annie who hadn't worked this hard since high school, and who if you'd asked her wouldn't have been able to explain what exactly she did other than it involved a lot of very particular paperwork.</p><p>She kind of hated it. But this was how it worked: a year of this, then she would be eligible for merit consideration and it was a leg up into the actual Department of Justice hierarchy of positions. A long and narrow road to climb, at the end of which was a shining beacon called Special Agent Annie Edison of the FBI.</p><p>Josh had understood. He'd been disappointed, which was…nice, actually. Her absence would make the evening worse, for somebody. It was a pleasant novelty, to feel desired like that. Maybe she should be thinking of Josh as her boyfriend, rather than just a boyfriend-candidate. Her next-to-last relationship, which was, God, five years ago now, she'd just jumped into bed with him. That has been a mistake, but her memories of Vaughn were more positive than negative. He'd made her feel special. Wanted.</p><p>Ugh. Annie drained the last of her refillable water bottle and weighed going to refill it now versus trying to finish this page first. It was already late…</p><p>She jumped in her seat when her phone started ringing. Nobody ever called her except for work stuff and never this late. Her heart sank when she saw the name on the caller ID.</p><p>"Jeff Winger In Case of Emergency." She really needed to change that ASAP. In the unlikely event she was in a horrible accident and the paramedics couldn't save her, or something, and they needed to notify somebody, they would check her phone for a contact. That contact probably shouldn't be her erstwhile crush-object/friend who lived in Colorado.</p><p>She'd just let it go to voicemail, she decided. Yes. She stood up, to go to the water fountain, and took a step. Her phone was still in her hand, still ringing. She should hit the cancel button. Boom, done.</p><p>"What do you want, Jeff?"</p><p>Whoops. Somehow she'd answered the phone. And identified him by name, and probably also signaled in some subtle way a clue as to her emotional state.</p><p>"Hello, Annie."</p><p>Dammit. Two words and she could already feel herself trying to find some way to rationalize apologizing to him. Fixing him is not your job, she reminded herself. He took your emotional support and gave you nothing back. <em> Nothing. </em></p><p>There was a fraught silence. Fraught on her end, at least. He was probably watching television in a bar somewhere.</p><p>Eventually he cleared his throat. “Can you hear me? Annie?”</p><p>“Sorry, yeah, hi,” Annie said reflexively.</p><p>“Is this a bad time?” She could almost hear the furrow in his brow, the slight squint that signaled what passed for apologetic concern. “I can call back.”</p><p>“No! I mean, no.” If she told him to call back another time then he would and then she would spend between now and then waiting on tenterhooks. She had work to do but she wasn’t going to get any of it done until this was dealt with. “I’m glad you called,” she added without thinking, and winced. That was exactly the kind of thing that she shouldn’t be telling him. It was the kind of thing that shouldn’t be true.</p><p>“Thank you,” he said, as if he understood it was an admission on her part and she were entrusting him with a secret he felt honored to share.</p><p>No. That was stupid. Annie was great at assigning subtext to bland remarks, when they were Jeff Winger’s bland remarks. She wished she were better-rested, less stressed, not all alone at the wrong end of the continent. “Well, you’re welcome.”</p><p>“I miss you.”</p><p>“I miss you too,” she said. She made a face as soon as she’d said it. She hadn’t meant to admit that.</p><p>He seemed to take it as a meaningless pleasantry, though. “So, uh, what’s new? How’s it going? Has Obama put you in charge of the Justice Department yet?”</p><p>She tried not to smile, failed. It was fine. He couldn’t see her face. “Not yet. It’s…basically it’s a lot of paperwork. Compiling reports nobody reads. And somehow even though it’s really boring and not intellectually challenging, it’s exhausting.”</p><p>“Ugh. Sounds like some of the worst parts of being a lawyer crossed with some of the worst parts of being a teacher.”</p><p>Annie was about to say something like <em> i know i hate it i can’t wait to go home and see you i miss you </em>but she bit her tongue in time. “Yes, it is indeed very glamorous,” she said instead.</p><p>“Well, you’ve only been there for, what, four months?”</p><p>Five, she didn’t say. Three, not counting the internship.</p><p>“I’m sure that by the end of the year you’ll have secured a Cabinet-level position. Or at least that your coworkers and supervisor will realize what an asset you are and takes steps to ensure you don’t get promoted over them.”</p><p>Annie gasped. “Why would you say that?”</p><p>“What?” Jeff sounded confused, like he thought what he’d just said was a compliment and not some kind of bizarre indictment of a bunch of people he had never met, coupled with an implicit rebuke of her for not being tough enough to navigate the internal politics of her office.</p><p>Ugh. She was probably inserting subtext again. Annie cringed, thankful it wasn’t a video call and she could silently emote as much as she wanted.</p><p>“I, uh…I didn’t mean anything by that…”</p><p>“It’s fine,” Annie lied. “I just mean I’m doing okay, okay?”</p><p>“I’m sure you’re doing great,” Jeff said quickly, as though he were agreeing that Nazis were bad or vaccines were desirable or some other issue he didn’t want to be caught on the wrong side of. “You’re amazing.”</p><p>“I started…” She trailed off, because she had been going to start telling him about Josh, and in the moment she could think of literally nothing she could say about Josh that wouldn’t lead Jeff to believe that Josh was just an inferior copy of him. Even his name was a bad Xerox. He was about ten years younger, that was it. “I started jogging,” she said, to cover the increasingly awkward pause. “There’s a treadmill in the fitness center in my building.”</p><p>“Uh huh,” Jeff said, cautiously. “Hey, uh, you know Troy is back?”</p><p>“What?” Annie had never believed Troy was dead, exactly, pirates or no pirates. She had, however, made peace with the idea that she was never going to see him again.</p><p>“Yeah, he’s back. Got home a couple of weeks ago now.”</p><p>“How…?” Had Annie so fully fallen off social media she’d been informed and had just missed it? No. Troy’s Twitter was silent and his WhatsApp was off.</p><p>“He’s been keeping it really quiet.” Jeff’s tone imputed secondhand embarrassment that he of all people was the person who told Annie that Troy was alive and well and back home. “I don’t think he’s told Abed, even.”</p><p>“Really?” That made her feel a little better.</p><p>“Yeah. I’m not sure what he’s thinking. You’ll see him yourself soon, though, right? You’re going to visit in three weeks. It’s still Friday to Friday?”</p><p>“Oh, yeah.” The truth was Annie had about made up her mind to skip the Thanksgiving trip. She hadn’t bought a ticket. Plane tickets were expensive. And she didn’t exactly have time off available.That Friday-to-Friday plan was a holdover from an earlier era. She’d end up flying out Wednesday and back Sunday, if not Saturday. “I don’t know.”</p><p>“Okay.” Did he know what ‘I don’t know’ meant, in context? Yes, yes he did. “I was really hoping we would have a chance to talk when you came back at the end of the summer. That’s what we’d said we’d do.”</p><p>Annie grimaced at his tone — performatively hurt, concealing an underlying layer of genuine hurt. Like he didn’t deserve for her to mistreat him so. “I know.” She swallowed and wished she’d refilled her water bottle. “I know we said that. This was just a really good opportunity for me. Or I thought it was.” </p><p>“Hey, I’m all for you getting opportunities. I wouldn’t want to hold you back—“</p><p>“Okay, that’s not fair,” she snapped. “What do you want me to do, Jeff? Quit this stupid job I hate and go running back to—to Greendale?” Dammit. She may as well have just gone ahead and said <em> back to you </em>. She definitely shouldn’t have admitted she hated her new job. It was just temporary, anyway.</p><p>“Of course not,” he responded, after just enough of a pause that she knew he’d tried and failed to come up with a way to make <em> yes </em> sound like a heroic good-guy supportive-friend answer. </p><p>She ruthlessly suppressed the sting of disappointment she felt at that. She didn’t want him to convince her to go back home. She didn’t.</p><p>“And I’m sorry,” Jeff added, “for what I said when you told me you were staying in DC. In the moment, it hurt. You hurt me.”</p><p>“Well, I’d say now we’re even,” Annie replied, as coldly as she could, “except I don’t really think that’s true.” She didn’t <em> need </em>to list off all the ways he’d hurt her, over the years.</p><p>“Then I guess it’s a good thing I can’t hurt you any more.”</p><p>“Yes,” Annie lied. “It’s good.”</p>
<hr/><p><em> Well, I think I speak for everybody when I say that could have gone better</em>.</p><p>Jeff dug sullenly into his takeout, alone in his empty apartment.</p><p><em> Although</em>, Annie might have said if she had been there and had, impossibly, listened in on the phone call, <em> it could definitely have gone worse. </em></p><p>Hard to see how.</p><p>She would have ticked her answers off on her fingers. <em> You didn’t break down sobbing. You didn’t tell me you’re drinking too much and maybe you have a problem and try to make it my problem. You didn’t talk me into abandoning my more-or-less-lifelong dream. You didn’t even try to do that, and arguably I gave you a perfect opening for it, put a pin in that for later. And, you know, before you screwed up, back at the start of the conversation, I said I missed you. </em></p><p>She’d said she missed him <em> too </em>. It was just a reflexive response, like ‘God bless you’ after a sneeze.</p><p>
  <em> It’s not my job to fix you, Jeff. </em>
</p><p>He knew that, of course. He didn’t expect her to.</p><p>If she had been there she would have frowned, leaned forward, tilted her head the way she did sometimes. <em> You’re stewing in your own juices. You’ve been holed up in here or in your office way too much. Call Troy. Call Britta. Call Frankie. Call Craig! Talk to them, not me. Either of me. Better yet, see a therapist.  </em></p><p>Yeah, yeah.</p><p><em> You might not ever see me again, </em> ever, <em> so don’t think you’re doing it for me</em>, she’d have cautioned. <em> Or if that’s what it takes, fine, believe you’re doing it for me. You deserve some amount of happiness. I still, after everything, want you to be happy. Even if I don’t actually miss you and I’m busy because I’m still finding my sea legs in DC and who knows, maybe I have a boyfriend and I don’t want you to feel bad about that so I didn’t mention it. Though if I do, I probably should. Otherwise you might get your hopes up. Maybe I should tell you I have a boyfriend even if I don’t. If I don’t I will soon, though. I’m basically the Platonic ideal of a woman (except for the age thing, which to many men would be a plus, you know) and you aren’t there to loom over me and scare away guys I might like. </em></p><p>This wasn’t helping.</p><p>
  <em> No, it’s not! That’s my point! Go talk to somebody else! </em>
</p><p> </p><p>NEXT: EGG NOG AND CONFESSIONS!</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Make new friends,<br/>But keep the old.<br/>One is silver,<br/>The other gold.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. The Sun So Hot I Froze to Death</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>A week before Thanksgiving Jeff gave up on his new therapist.</p><p>Troy met him for coffee, afterwards. Troy had an open schedule and, he said, a vested interest in Jeff's mental health. Troy had been thrilled to hear Jeff was giving therapy another try.</p><p>Troy was starting to freak Jeff out.</p><p>"He's incredibly nice, he's like twenty-five, he's worth north of twenty million dollars, he calls me at least once a week just to see how I'm doing. He's like the hero of a badly-plotted romance novel where there's no conflict," Jeff had told Loreen. Loreen was his new therapist.</p><p>"I'm sorry, are you a villain in this scenario?" Loreen had asked him, which just went to show how little she'd gotten it.</p><p>"No, no," Jeff had snapped, "I'm the heroine."</p><p>"Okay." Loreen had displayed the kind of measured equanimity that suggested she'd imputed the wrong subtext.</p><p>That was strike two for Loreen. Strike one had been when she'd started off by asking him about his family. Not a great opener, in Jeff's opinion. Strike three had been their second session, when he'd tried to tell her about the magic door.</p><p>Troy sipped from the straw of his eggnog milkshake-thing that may as well have had a stick of butter in it. "I heard about that. But I heard about it from Abed and Britta, so…" He shrugged. "Britta mostly wanted to assure me that she was absolutely one hundred percent not attracted to you even slightly."</p><p>"Are you and Britta back together?" Jeff asked, because he saw an opportunity to shift the topic away from himself.</p><p>Troy shook his head. "Nah, man. I mean that both as in, nah, we're not, and also nah, you're not getting out of telling me about the magic door. Abed barely mentioned the door. For Abed it was mostly a day about how community and teamwork defeated evil, in the form of Subway Sandwiches. It was like three weeks after LeVar and I got picked up by the pirates. There was a door and you opened it. Go."</p><p>"Okay. Sure." Jeff took a sip from his almond milk latte and tried not to be envious of Troy's eggnog thing. They were fifteen years apart in age, he reminded himself. When Troy was Jeff's age, he'd be drinking the healthy drinks, too.</p><p>Of course, he'd probably be worth sixty million dollars by then.</p><p>"We were sealed in this bunker under the old computer science building. Me and Britta and Abed and Craig, and Annie. You know that part, right? I don't have to explain who Russell Borchert was?"</p><p>"Borchert, Borchert, loved computers, more than women's…" Troy glanced around. The coffee shop was relatively crowded, with a half-dozen or more people in earshot, though none of them seemed to be listening. No kids. Still, he didn't finish the rhyme. "Yeah."</p><p>"So he had this computer that was wired to detect, uh, human passion." Jeff tried not to make a face. Just power through the story. "And it was connected to the door. To open the door, somebody had to wear this dumb helmet thing and, uh, feel passion, I guess."</p><p>"And you did that?" Troy asked him, as though this were the most reasonable thing in the world.</p><p>"Yeah, well, right before that part, we were talking to Dr. Borchert. He was defending his decision to live in a secret bunker and devote himself to his research, and I said something like, you've put so much in and gotten nothing back, you deserve better than that. Trying to convince him to go back to the surface."</p><p>Troy nodded attentively.</p><p>"And Annie said something about how we have to let people be who they are, and want what they want, and respect their choices even if they're stupid, and in that moment, listening to her, I realized three things. The first was how ridiculous the idea of marrying Britta was."</p><p>"Yeah. When Britta told me this story she was <em> real </em> clear on how that would never have actually happened," Troy said.</p><p>Jeff grimaced. "The second thing was that Annie was talking about me. Or that I had been talking about her, when I said Dr. Borchert should move on from his lifelong passion project. Anyway, I could see her, in that moment, decide to stop giving me more of herself than I was giving her of myself. And good for her. That was the right call," Jeff said thickly.</p><p>"What was the third thing, man?" Troy asked him quietly.</p><p>"The third thing was that I was in love with her, and I'd been in love with her for… I don't even know how long. Senior year, junior year maybe. I'd been in denial about it for all that time, and she'd been patiently just being there, waiting for me to wise up…"</p><p>"I remember. I was there. You two had a little thing going from the get-go."</p><p>"And then—" Jeff shifted forward in his seat, leaned in like he was sharing a secret. "You gotta understand, I had turned forty the week before, and celebrated it by...kind of sort of trying to kill myself."</p><p>Troy solemnly took a long suck from the straw of his eggnog thing, holding eye contact with Jeff the entire time. "Yeah," he said at last.</p><p>"If I'd been—God, I don't know what she thought, exactly. Thirty-five, thirty-seven, somewhere in there, that would have been too much of an age gap by itself…"</p><p>"I don't know about that," Troy said. "But we're getting down in the weeds, here. You realized you were in love with Annie just as she stopped being available to you. Setting aside how shitty that must have been on her end—"</p><p>"I know, I know," Jeff muttered.</p><p>"I bet it was a real kick in the teeth for you, too."</p><p>"In the moment I didn't really process it. I didn't believe myself, actually. That's why I opened the door."</p><p>"You didn't open the door to escape the bunker?"</p><p>"Well, obviously. But I—" Jeff's voice cracked. "You know, Loreen had cut me off before I got to this part. I don't know if she thought I was making it all up or if she thought it was all a bunch of metaphors for aging—"</p><p>Troy looked doubtful. "She maybe got distracted by the suicide attempt."</p><p>"It wasn't really a suicide attempt, that was--never mind. I opened the goddamn door. I put on the magic helmet and I tested it, I looked at each of them in turn and thought about how much they meant to me. Abed, Craig, Britta. And nothing was happening."</p><p>"Are you sure nothing was happening? Maybe you were building up a charge," Troy said.</p><p>Jeff stared at him a moment. That possibility had honestly never occurred to him. "Maybe," he said eventually. "I guess. At the time I thought it meant that I didn't love them, or that I loved them only, you know, a normal human amount. Then I looked at Annie and—" He had to stop for a moment. He took a breath, recovered, continued. "I thought about everything we'd done together, and about what she'd just said and what I knew it meant, and...I'm sorry, sorry." His voice cracked again. Jeff was wiping away tears. Somehow nobody in the coffee shop was staring at him. "It was like I'd been punched in the solar plexus. But I didn't have time to react, because the computer pinged and the door opened and we all had other things to deal with."</p><p>While Jeff recovered himself a little, Troy mulled this over. "And Loreen," he said, "she was more into, like, let's circle back to the killing-yourself-for-turning-forty thing? Seems like the kind of thing a therapist is going zero in on."</p><p>"Yeah, well, that's not the thing that keeps me up at night."</p><p>“This door thing keeps you up at night? I mean, sure, it’s weird, but—“</p><p>“Annie keeps me up at night,” Jeff snapped. “I’m about at the limit of what I’m willing to talk to you about, no offense.”</p><p>“None taken, man. This is some mind-squishing stuff. It’s a lot for you to have to deal with.”</p><p>“I should have gone with my first impulse. Just kept it surface. ‘Hey, how are you? Well? Me, too.’ It would have been easier to move past it.”</p><p>“Sure, yeah. Maybe. You think? I feel like with therapy you don’t want to keep things surface. That’s what you’re paying for, right?”</p><p>“What? No. Yes, but, no. I called Annie up, a couple of weeks ago. She said she wasn’t coming back for Thanksgiving, and I didn’t react great to that.”</p><p>Troy sipped his eggnog thing as he listened. “Well, sure,” he said. “I was disappointed when I heard she wasn’t going to be here, too. And I’m not, y’know…” He pointed at Jeff. “Whatever this is over here.”</p><p>Jeff scowled, nodded, finished his latte.  “But seriously, I’m done talking about this.”</p><p>“Okay, cool, man. We can talk about other things.”</p><p>“Are you and Britta getting back together?” Jeff asked again, because it was the closest thing to a bitingly incisive probe he could come up with off the top of his head.</p><p>Troy made a bemused face. “Nah, man. I dunno. We got together in the first place because we like each other and we get along, but actually being together was kind of a drag because we didn’t have interests in common. I was dragging her to the kind of <em> Inspector Spacetime </em> stuff Abed and I used to do, or she was dragging me to something artsy or political. The sex was great. I mean, I thought so, she liked it, we had a lot of fun there. Better than anything before or since, because we liked each other, it was a thing we were doing together. Other than occasionally getting high, it was the only thing we really did together that we both enjoyed.”</p><p>Jeff stirred uncomfortably in his seat.</p><p>Troy noticed. “Oh, man, I know, you and she were doing a thing for a little while there, I didn’t mean to make a comparison. I know Britta always saw it as a really different thing...anyway, now I see her, it’s like she’s this whole different person. She said she started doing a lot more weed for a while after I left, and it kind of messed her up, and she’s doing better about it now, which is great. And you know, I’ve changed, too. Grown. Anyway, she’s still one of my favorite people. Like, top five. Maybe top two. I dunno, it’s really more a tier system than individual rankings. You're up there, man, don't worry. What we have going on now is more a friends-with-benefits kind of situation. A few times when Britta has stayed over at the house. It’s not the reason we’re spending time together, it’s not assumed, it’s just very low-key and casual. I wouldn’t be telling you this if I didn’t think she’d be cool with it.” Troy yawned, then, turning his head instead of covering his mouth. Jeff was reminded of the big housecat who’d lived next door when he was kid. ”If she started seeing a guy tomorrow, or a lady for that matter, I wouldn’t feel betrayed or anything. I guess I'd be surprised.”</p><p>“When you go outside,” Jeff asked him, “do animated birds land on your shoulder and sing duets with you?”</p><p>Troy looked baffled.</p><p>“Because you’re an impossibly perky, well-adjusted Disney princess of a person. And this is coming from me, a man who... I’ve spent a lot of time in the company of Annie Edison.”</p><p>“I wouldn’t call Annie <em> well-adjusted </em> exactly, and I used to live with her,” Troy pointed out. “For a second there I thought you were doing a racism. <em> Song of the South</em>.”</p><p>Jeff was suitably abashed. “Sorry.”</p><p>“It’s cool, man. I got you something.” Troy fished a small ring box out of his coat pocket. “Here.”</p><p>Jeff gingerly took it. He must have looked worried, because Troy chuckled a little.</p><p>“It’s okay, man, I’m not proposing. Open it.”</p><p>Inside was… a house key, on a ring with a fob.</p><p>“It’s a key to Hawthorne House,” Troy explained. “The button on the thingy there opens the gate in the front, and the numbers engraved on it are the code for the security system so you don’t forget. I’ve set the security system off like eight times. Right now really only the pool house is livable, but in a few weeks it’ll all be done. You come by any time. <em> Any time.</em> Make yourself at home. Take over one of the bedrooms if you want. If I’m not there, if Abed and I aren’t there, no worries. Think of it as being your house too, okay? I’ve already given Abed and Britta keys like this. Gonna mail Annie and Shirley. I know, they’re not here, but when they come back—to visit, or whatever—they have a place. Our place.”</p><p>Jeff stared down at the key for a moment before looking Troy in the eye. “Chang isn’t getting a key, is he?”</p><p>Troy shook his head. “Just the six of us.”</p>
<hr/><p>Annie would have turned to Abed, but Abed was at home in Greendale, so that was a no. Annie wasn’t ready to talk to Jeff again, maybe wouldn’t ever be, and if she talked to Abed then what if Jeff was there wherever Abed was and Abed just silently passed the phone to Jeff while Annie was mid-sentence and Jeff just grunted, and she didn’t realize she wasn’t still talking to Abed, and she told Jeff something she didn’t want him to hear?</p><p>It was an obvious problem. Britta, Troy, Craig, and Frankie were all out for the same reasons. It seemed really unlikely that Frankie in particular would conspire with Jeff against her in that way, but if she was excluding everybody else in Colorado then it would have been unfair to call Frankie.</p><p>That just left Shirley.</p><p>“I feel like I'm not making great choices," she told Shirley, when their game of voicemail tag finally resolved with a telephonic rendezvous the Saturday before Thanksgiving. "I'm all up in my head about it. Stupid Jeff Winger."</p><p>"Annie, dear, you know I love you, but I think for me to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with you on this one I need a little more context. What did that big-foreheaded lump of muscles and anxiety do this time?"</p><p>Annie sighed, because of course this was a reasonable question to ask. "He called me up one evening just to see how I was doing."</p><p>"The bastard!" Shirley clucked her tongue sympathetically. "Is this related to the conversation you two agreed to have when you went back there from your internship, that you didn't have because you didn't go back there from your internship?"</p><p>"Yeah, kind of. It was the first time talking to him since I told him I wasn't going home. Ugh." It was weeks ago now but it had been eating at Annie the entire time. "He just--I felt like I needed to defend my choices, you know, and now I'm second-guessing myself. Like with Josh."</p><p>"Josh? There's a Josh now, too?"</p><p>"Yeah, he's this guy--he's an associate at one of the firms near here and we met at this end of summer thing. He's… I tried to imagine telling Jeff about him, and all I could come up with was that he's like a less good, but younger version of Jeff."</p><p>"That sounds unfair."</p><p>"I know, I mean, it's not like Jeff is <em> old </em> old—"</p><p>"I mean, surely this boy Josh has other qualities. I can’t begin to guess at them because you’ve given me nothing to work with. Seriously, Annie, you’ve been pretty much radio-silent ever since you left Greendale. Not that I judge. You’ve got your own life to live. You need to to do what you want and what’s best for you, not try to live for other people.”</p><p>“What if I don’t know what I want?” Annie asked her suddenly. “Or what if what I want isn’t what I thought I wanted, it’s what I wanted before I thought I didn’t want it after all? And maybe I was right when I thought I didn’t want it! What if I just bounce around, back and forth, never committing to anything because being in this medium zone feels safe and familiar?”</p><p>“Annie, sweetie, once again I feel like I’m missing some context. If you think you’re with this boy Josh for the wrong reasons, you owe it to yourself, and him, to tell him so.”</p><p>Annie grimaced, trying to figure out how to articulate it. It wasn’t Josh—or it wasn’t <em> just </em> Josh. It was every single aspect of living in NoVa (which is what cool people called northern Virginia, it had taken her way too long to put that together) and working at the stupid office job. She was getting better at handling it — when she’d talked to Jeff, that had been the lowest point. Since then she’d figured out how to get eighty percent of her work done in twenty percent of the time; that was the secret everybody except her knew, that you could get by doing a half-assed job and if you tried to do everything a hundred percent you worked yourself ragged.</p><p>“Josh is okay,” she mumbled into the phone, because she knew Shirley was waiting for a response. And Josh <em> was </em> okay. He was fine. He would do.</p><p>Annie had always been led to understand, by women’s magazines and romance novels and smutty fanfic, that when you started sleeping with a guy you liked it made you...really <em> happy </em> for a while. Josh didn’t have any complaints in that department, she was pretty sure. But on her end it felt so hollow. She’d tried, she’d made a good-faith effort, to picture holding hands with Josh at Disneyland. But it just didn’t work. He would turn into Jeff, or Jeff would show up there and shove him away, or she would turn and run from Josh until she found Jeff.</p><p>Either something was wrong with Josh, or something was wrong with her. And she knew which one was more likely to be true. It was like Britta’s carnie, or how Shirley talked about her ex-husband sometimes: Annie could never be completely free from Jeff Winger.  She would have been okay, though, if he hadn’t called her up like that. She absolutely would have been fine. It was like there was a timer inside her, and every time she interacted with Jeff it reset. She'd resolutely ignored it for that entire final year at Greendale, but...</p><p>Shirley was waiting for her to say something, again. Annie realized she’d completely missed whatever Shirley had just said. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “I was just, I tuned out for a moment, could you repeat that? Sorry.”</p><p>“I was trying to change the subject, because I don’t think I can help you with what’s troubling you right now. I might suggest you start going to church.”</p><p>“Temple, Shirley,” Annie reminded her for the nth time. “We call it temple.”</p><p>“I’m not saying you need a better relationship with Jesus. In this moment I’m not saying that. That’s a conversation for another time. But you need other people in your life. Especially if you’re going to break it off with this boy Josh that I still know next to nothing about. Church--or temple, fine, that's fine--it's good for meeting people. Decent people: church people. What else are you going to do, go to bars? I’ve spent a lot of time in bars, Annie. Nobody’s at their best in a bar. Everybody there’s a Britta or a…” Shirley trailed off, but Annie could hear the <em> Jeff </em> on the tip on her tongue. “Not to judge. I’ve been a Britta. And you know I don’t really mean <em> Britta </em> Britta—“</p><p>“Okay! Yeah. I appreciate the thought. I’ll be okay, Shirley. I just let myself get really rattled. I’ll be fine, though. I just need time away to process everything.”</p><p>“You take as much time as you need,” Shirley told her. “Speaking of, are you going to miss Troy and Abed’s holiday party? I know you’re not going back for Thanksgiving.”</p><p>“Yeah. I don’t think I’m going home this year. I mean, like I said, I need time away to process.”</p><p>“All right,” Shirley said gently. “Don’t think that you have to stop being friends with all the rest of us if you need to cut back on Jeff Winger in your life, though.”</p><p>“I won’t, don’t worry. Josh wants me to do Thanksgiving with his family. He’s said something vague about Christmas, too. I think he doesn’t want to push his luck.”</p><p>Shirley hummed. “Maybe he can tell your heart isn’t in it.”</p><p>“Maybe,” Annie admitted. “Maybe I should get with the program and come around, because he’s tall, witty, good-looking, smart, an attentive lover who is actually very patient with me being weird or prickly or hot-and-cold, and he’s been clear about being into me and being willing to—“</p><p>Shirley burst out laughing. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, it’s just...you say he's attentive and patient and you think he’s an inferior copy of Jeff?”</p><p>“Well,” Annie said, chuckling herself, “not when I say all that out loud…”</p><p> </p><p>NEXT: BRITTA DRINKS MARTINIS!</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>It rained all night the day I left,<br/>The weather, it was dry.<br/>The sun so hot I froze to death,<br/>Suzanna, don't you cry.<br/>Oh! Suzanna, don't you cry for me.<br/>For I've gone to Louisiana my true love for to see.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Until Then We'll Have to Muddle Through Somehow</h2></a>
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    <p>"December 10th, 2015. A day that will live in infamy," Troy intoned. "On this, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, we come together and celebrate."</p><p>The assembled guests, lounging in the huge central living room of what Troy was slowly convincing everybody to call Hawthorne House, all made little wha? noises. </p><p>Frankie, sitting at one end of a sofa with a glass of wine, cleared her throat. "Pearl Harbor day was seventy-<em>four</em> years ago, as of Monday the 7th."</p><p>"Are you sure?" Craig asked from the floor in front of the facing sofa. "December 10th sounds correct."</p><p>"No, no, she's right." Shirley, sprawled on the couch above her erstwhile dean, gestured towards Frankie. "December 7th, 1941, a day that will live in infamy."</p><p>"Also Pearl Harbor Day isn't generally so much celebrated as commemorated," Frankie added. "Thousands of people died."</p><p>"Well, what's December 10th?" Britta, sitting next to Frankie, looked around. "Anybody?"</p><p>Abed cleared his throat. "December 10th is the day we had our first holiday celebration as a study group," he said. Abed had positioned himself in a high-backed chair facing the Christmas tree, directly under the equestrian portrait of Pierce circa the Reagan era that they'd found somewhere deep in the bowels of the mansion and hung in a place of honor.</p><p>"Right," muttered Elroy. He was seated comfortably. It's not really important exactly where. "Every community-college study group celebrates the holidays together, after all. Nothing weird about that."</p><p>"Ten December is the anniversary of the Falklands conflict," suggested Ian Duncan. He was also seated comfortably somewhere in the still slightly barren great room. There were enough chairs and couches for a dozen people to sit without being crowded, arranged in conversational groupings not unlike a hotel lobby.</p><p>Frankie scoffed. "No, it's not. That was in....I want to say April? It was definitely spring."</p><p>"Feh. I forget sometimes, you Americans are still on the Imperial calendar." Duncan tsked. "The rest of the world switched to the metric system ages ago."</p><p>"You know," Jeff mused, "sometimes I wonder, is he actually British? Or is it all just an elaborate put-on?" He sipped his scotch. Jeff had let everybody talk him into ceasing his day-drinking, but it was after six, and a party.</p><p>"Aw, shucks, Jeffah," Duncan said in an absolutely terrible attempt at an American accent. "Yew hayve fay-ownd ow-wuh-tuh my baig say-crate."</p><p>Troy gasped. "I knew it! I barely understood that, but I knew it!"</p><p>"In what region do Americans pronounce 'out' with three syllables?" Jeff asked, smiling.</p><p>"He's not really British! It all makes sense now," Troy marveled.</p><p>"What? No!" Duncan cried in his normal voice. "That was a joke!"</p><p>"Was it, though? Maybe it was the truth, escaping after a lifetime of lies slowly piling up into a weight too heavy for any man to bear," suggested Chang. "First you thought, it's just one little bit of padding my resume, but then you start the job and they have questions and you have to come up with new lies to cover for the stuff you don't know. Then you're terrified of contradicting yourself, so you adopt a hostile, antisocial persona so people won't ask you more questions. The stress stops you from sleeping. You lose track of your own thoughts, opinions, and desires within the part you play. Someone asks you what you want on your pizza, and you panic. Do you answer honestly, or do you try to make up something weird and off-putting so that nobody tries to get close to you? Alienating people becomes a habit. What with everything going on, your performance in the bedroom suffers, and your wife thinks it's her fault, and you don't know how to tell her--" He broke off to take a sip of his egg nog, and afterwards smiled placidly, as if he'd completed relating a humorous anecdote.</p><p>There was a brief silence and then everybody started talking at once.</p><p>"I love Christmas," Abed observed to no one in particular.</p>
<hr/><p>When Britta's phone rang she'd been bemused, because pretty much everybody she knew was at the party. When she saw the caller ID she quickly rose from the sofa where she'd been chatting with Frankie and Shirley. "I'm going to go someplace quiet," she told them, and stepped away from the noise of the party down a hallway. She'd lost track of her drink but there was another vodka martini sitting on the sideboard waiting for her if she wanted it -- she'd put it there herself, earlier. Its three friends had migrated away from the sideboard and into her body, but one of the clique remained. The femme brunette art gallery owner, Britta decided as she scooped it up.</p><p>"Annie, hi," she said as soon as she'd passed through a door she could close.</p><p>"Hey Britta! Happy holidays!" Annie was as cheery as ever. "Are you at the party?"</p><p>"I was, I just stepped out. Do you want me to go back in, put you on speaker? Troy and Abed probably have some kind of video screen FaceTime thing we could turn on--"</p><p>"No, no, no," Annie said quickly. "Don't go to that kind of trouble. I just missed you guys. I wanted to call. I know I haven't been very good at keeping in touch since I left."</p><p>"That's what happens, though, right?" Britta looked around. In her haste she hadn't paid attention to which room she went into. Like much of Hawthorne House it was almost empty of furniture, just a couple of folding chairs facing a wall-mounted screen with a paused PlayStation game on it. The console sat on the floor, alone but for a controller charging station. "Do LED televisions get burn-in like the old kind did?"</p><p>"What?"</p><p>"Never mind, I'm sure it's fine." Britta took a sip of her martini and sat down. "And you not calling or texting, or responding to calls and texts, also fine."</p><p>"I've responded <em>some</em>," Annie protested. "I didn't call to apologize for not calling."</p><p>"That came out wrong. Don't worry about it, I said." Britta glanced around the empty room. "You sure you don't want me to go back in to the party and put you on speaker? I could pass the phone around if you would rather do it that way."</p><p>"Please don't. Let's just you and me talk. Is that okay?" Annie sounded anxious.</p><p>"Okay, sure," Britta said.</p><p>Annie said nothing.</p><p>"You want me to start?" Britta offered. "I've been thinking about moving in here."</p><p>"To Pierce's mansion? I mean, Troy's mansion?"</p><p>"Hawthorne House," Britta corrected her. "That's what we call it now. There's a lot of space here. And Troy is already paying the rent on our apartment--his old apartment. So, it wouldn't be bad. I think. Your boxes are in the basement over here now, by the way." Britta straightened up, remembering. "Abed's here, too! Did you know that?"</p><p>"I figured," Annie said. "You wouldn't rather have your own place, though?"</p><p>"I've had my own place. I mean, before I moved in with you it was me and the cats. Then when you and Abed moved out I was alone all summer. I was actually thinking about seeing if Frankie needed a roommate when Troy came back. And not because I was having trouble making rent. Not just because of that."</p><p>"Okay," Annie said. "Okay. Tell me about...tell me about Greendale."</p><p>"Same old, same old. I'm gonna graduate in the spring, finally. Then--oh, did I tell you this? Then I'm going to be the Greendale guidance counselor! We haven't had a guidance counselor since 1981, so, it's kind of a big deal."</p><p>"That's great!" Annie gushed, on cue. "I mean, you did tell me, months ago, but it's great to hear that's still on track!"</p><p>"I know! Frankie set it up. Frankie's great."</p><p>"She is, yeah. So... what's the latest with Leonard? Is he still walking around with that dumb wig?"</p><p>"Britta made an unhappy noise. "Oh. Leonard died back in September. I thought you knew."</p><p>"Leonard's dead?" Annie's voice was small, through the phone. "I didn't know, no. That... wow."</p><p>"He was really old, and he lived a long life, and he died in his sleep," Britta assured her.</p><p>"Yeah."</p><p>Britta expected Annie to say more than that, so there were a few moments of silence while she sipped her drink. Then she took the plunge -- she needed to tell somebody. "So, I've been really attracted to Troy lately."</p><p>"Britta?" Annie sounded equal parts amused and scandalized. "What?"</p><p>"I know. It's so cliché. Your ex goes away for a while, comes back with a beard and twenty million dollars..."</p><p>"I mean, um," Annie said, "what's your read on him?"</p><p>"He's great. I mean, I don't know. Maybe he's open to trying again. We've had sex two and a half times since he came back."</p><p>"A half--? Never mind, I don't want to know. But if you want to go for it, sure!" Annie sounded surprisingly upbeat. Britta had expected her to be down on the idea, although she didn't really know why.</p><p>"You think? I mean, we have fun together, sometimes, but he hangs out with Abed, or he's up to his elbows in the food bank--"</p><p>"Food bank?"</p><p>"The Greendale Food Bank. It's Troy's new thing. There used to be a food bank, years ago, I guess? It got closed down for lack of funds. Troy's bringing it back. God, just telling you that, I kind of want to go find him right now and--" Britta stopped herself before she became embarrassingly pornographic. "You know."</p><p>"Britta, are you drunk?"</p><p>"No! Maybe a little. Yeah, I'm pretty drunk. It's a party."</p><p>"I'm used to high Britta, not drunk Britta. High Britta talks about how she wishes she was a lesbian so she could date Frankie. Drunk Britta talks about sex with Troy. I'm learning all kinds of new things tonight."</p><p>"I don't remember that!" Britta cried with insincere shame. "Did I say that once when I was high? That I wanted to date Frankie but I'm too straight?"</p><p>"No," Annie assured her. She was laughing, now. "You didn't say it once, you said it five or six times. At least twice to Frankie's face."</p><p>"Oh, God! Now I'm embarrassed!" Britta groaned and laughed at the same time. </p><p>"I don't think she was offended. Flattered? Maybe, maybe not. But not offended."</p><p>"I guess it's good that I'm not smoking so much. Quick, change the subject! How are you? What's your life like?"</p><p>"I'm doing great. I'm okay. It was a big change, all at once." Annie's tone suggested she was relieved to be telling someone this. "It kind of reminded me of when I got out of rehab and I started at Greendale. I didn't know anybody, I wasn't sure I was making good choices, I was trying my best but there was so much to deal with. But then I met you, and the rest of the study group, and it got better."</p><p>Britta made a noise of feigned indignation. "You're saying you've made new friends? Without my approval?"</p><p>She could hear Annie almost-laugh, which was what Britta had been going for. "No, no, nothing so drastic. I've met some people. I've been seeing a guy, that basically never happened at Greendale."</p><p>"Good for you! So what's he--"</p><p>"Ugh, I don't know." The color had drained from Annie's voice so completely and abruptly that Britta paused to check her phone and make sure it wasn't flashing an error or warning message. "It was pretty rough for a while there."</p><p>"Rough," Britta repeated. She remembered a phrase that was helpful in a therapeutic context. "Expand on that."</p><p>"I felt really overwhelmed at work, and I missed home, and..." A pause while Annie swallowed. Whatever she'd been going to say, she apparently decided against it and went another way instead. "In fact I almost got...I did, I got a prescription for Adderall. I didn't get it filled, though. I just...lied a bunch to the doctor and he gave me a prescription."</p><p>"Oh, Annie," Britta said, because she didn't know what else to say. "You can always call me. When did this happen?"</p><p>"Like a month ago. Right after Halloween. Jeff called, and--"</p><p>"<em>Jeff</em> drove you to Adderall? Son of a bitch!" Britta was on her feet before she knew it. The folding chair she'd been sitting on was flipped over. "I'll kick his ass right now! Hold on, because I'll have to set the phone down to do it--"</p><p>"No!" Annie's exhortation was emphatic enough to give Britta pause. "He just called me up to say hi, and I couldn't handle telling him about my life. At all. He seemed to think I was going to be named Attorney General, it was--it would have been nice, except. You know."</p><p>"Sure," Britta said slowly, even though she did not know at all. Rather than try to right the folding chair, which seemed like a substantial project, she decided instead to finish her martini and sit in the other folding chair. Just as a matter of practicality.</p><p>"It just worsened this, I don't know, spiral I was in. I wanted to call him and apologize, but I remembered what you told me about Blade, and I couldn't. So now I have a reminder in my phone to call him that goes off every day."</p><p>"Blade. I used to date Blade," Britta said. "Not date, really. It was...Blade was bad."</p><p>"Blade was bad," agreed Annie. "Troy is good."</p><p>"Troy is good. I want to have Troy's baby," Britta heard somebody say. Oh! It was her. She said that.</p><p>Annie was nonplussed. "What?"</p><p>"I mean, sometimes I see a baby somewhere and I just want to reach down and abduct it, you know? Kidnap it away to someplace across state lines. Steal it from its owners."</p><p>"Parents."</p><p>"Yes! You get it." Britta sighed with relief. "I'm so glad somebody gets it. What was I...stealing a baby. I want to steal a baby, and then I'm like, wait, I could just have one! That would be way less illegal!"</p><p>"Yeah, definitely. You know I'm currently employed by the Department of Justice, right?"</p><p>Britta scoffed. "You're not a cop, I know you. Cops are bad. You're good. I love you like a sister, Annie."</p><p>"I love you too, Britta," Annie told her.</p><p>"God. What were we talking about?" Britta tried to rewind the last minute or so of conversation. "Your life. How you're doing. Adderall. Adderall?"</p><p>"No, no, no Adderall. I realized, I don't need to do that. So I went to a different doctor and lied less and I started taking Wellbutrin. That's helped a lot. And Josh has been great."</p><p>"Josh?"</p><p>"My boyfriend," Annie said after a slight pause. "Right now he's my boyfriend. I'm not sure--"</p><p>"You should dump him," Britta said immediately and without hesitation. "If you have any doubts. You're, what, less than a month in?"</p><p>"Um, we've been seeing each other since... I guess it's more than three months now. Wow. I didn't realize."</p><p>"More than three months? Bloom's off the rose. Dump his ass," Britta said confidently.  "Ooh! Ooh!" she cried as a thought struck her. "We should date. You and me. Sisters doing it for ourselves!"</p><p>"Britta?"</p><p>Britta considered. "No, no, that won't work. You're in, shit, where are you? Boston?"</p><p>"What? No." Annie was perplexed. "Washington, D.C. Virginia, technically, but basically D.C."</p><p>"Whatever. You're waaay out there on the east coast. I can't date you. Not if I'm going to be with Troy. Or Frankie. Frankie's ahead of you in line. I'm sorry."</p><p>"That's okay, Britta," Annie said. "I think I'll live."</p><p>"And Jeff would kill me," Britta added, yawning. "He's totally in love with you."</p><p>"I don't think that's true, but okay."</p><p>"No, I mean..." Britta trailed off. "Troy told me stuff Jeff told him in confidence, in confidence. So if I tell you, it has to be in confidence."</p><p>"Please don't," Annie said quietly.</p><p>"But, oh, okay. Yeah, that's probably for the best. You should stick with your D.C. guy. Stay away from Jeff. Because he's damaged goods... I mean, he's not <em>mine</em>. You're welcome to him! Except don't."</p><p>"Thanks, Britta," Annie said. "That really helps put things in perspective. I feel better for having talked to you about it."</p><p>"Glad I could help," Britta said with another yawn.</p>
<hr/><p>Twelve hours later, Britta woke with a start. She was in bed, in the ugly hotel-room bed that Troy or somebody had picked out and installed. They were all rentals. Almost everything in the mansion was. The place needed real furnishing.</p><p>She sat up and discovered that while she was fully dressed, her bra had somehow migrated out of her shirt and gotten tangled in her hair. That took a second to fix. Also her shoes and socks had deserted her. Her glasses were sitting on her phone on the ugly rented nightstand, so that was something. But her phone's battery was dead.</p><p>She padded barefoot out of the bedroom and down the hall. Somehow she'd ended up upstairs, in the back of the house, where there were three spare bedrooms that shared one large-ish bathroom. Most of the other bedrooms had bathrooms en suite. Hawthorne House was exceedingly well-plumbed, she reflected as she made her way through the great room to the open kitchen.</p><p>"Morning, babe," Troy said when he saw her. He was sitting on a barstool in the kitchen, doing something with his laptop. "Coffee's fresh. There's some bacon and cheesy eggs over there, but they're probably cold. You're still vegetarian, not vegan or, uh, normal-person, right? I got some of your weird vegetarian bacon in the fridge."</p><p>Britta smiled and shook her head as she beelined to the coffee. "You're the best," she mumbled, pouring a cup. "I love you. I love you so much, coffee."</p><p>"Coffee loves you, too, I'm sure," Troy said with a grin.</p><p>"Is anybody else around?" Britta asked as she clutched her coffee with both hands and tried to see what Troy was looking at on his computer. Some talking-head video he'd paused when she came in.</p><p>"Abed's around. Jeff left a little while ago. Shirley got up early to meet her kids. I think Duncan's here too, hiding someplace, like, he hopes that if he stays long enough we'll forget he doesn't live here?"</p><p>"In fairness to him, that might work," Britta said.</p><p>"Only if you vouch for him," said Troy. "Or, I dunno. Maybe not."</p><p>"Last night is kind of a blur," Britta said. "I remember talking to Annie on the phone, and I remember karaoke, and...did we play basketball?"</p><p>Troy shook his head no. He was still smiling. "You wanted to, but everybody pointed out we didn't have a court. Or a ball. And that nobody but you wanted to."</p><p>"Bummer."</p><p>"I know, right? Hey, I wanted to ask you something." Troy closed the laptop. "You given any more thought to moving in here with me and Abed?"</p><p>"Well..." Britta looked around the big gorgeous kitchen, the big windows looking out on the snow-covered and weatherproofed pool, the big great room behind her with the portrait of Pierce and the Christmas tree that wouldn't have fit in her former apartment's living room even if you sawed it into pieces. Then she realized she was thinking of it as her former apartment, not her current apartment. "This house is pretty nice. It needs real furniture, though. Pictures on the walls, besides the haunted painting back there."</p><p>"Technically we don't know for sure that it's haunted," Troy said. "I mean, probably, yeah, look at it... The thing I wanted to ask you wasn't about if you're gonna move in, actually; it was, would you be willing to spearhead the interior-decoration initiative of the Hawthorne House project? Spearhead is a business term."</p><p>Britta sipped her coffee before responding. "You don't want to hire someone?"</p><p>"Not really, no. I think I've been pretty clear on this: you and Shirley and Jeff and Annie are all welcome here. Grab a bedroom. Take two, if you want. You move in here, we can let the old apartment go. But if Hawthorne House is <em>ours</em>, it should be <em>us</em> who decorates it. Decorate it? I don't know which is right."</p><p>"Did Shirley already turn you down?" Britta asked.</p><p>Troy shook his head. "If you turn me down I'll ask her, I guess. And sure, I'd want you to get her input. And Jeff's and Annie's and Abed's and mine. But I seen you with the swatches and the flowers and all that junk. You know you're a natural at it."</p><p>"Huh, wow." Britta tried to remember the last time someone had asked her to do a thing specifically because she, Britta Perry, was good at it, as opposed to just because they assumed she was available. Shirley's second wedding? God, how long ago was that? And it had been a decorating thing, too. Maybe the grifting thing, a year and change ago. Or had she just been a warm body and a pair of hands for Jeff and Annie's scam?</p><p>She tried real hard to think of a reason to decline. And to think of a reason not to move out of her apartment. But she was drawing a blank on both counts.</p><p>"This isn't about you and me, is it?" she finally asked.</p><p>Troy was nonplussed. "I don't think so?" He looked and sounded surprisingly uncertain.</p><p>"Because I'd be lying if I said I wasn't really into you, like, a lot. But things are finally starting to come together for me. It's like I'm finally getting to be a real grown-up instead of having to fake it, and I don't want to mess that up..."</p><p>"Sure." Troy glanced around, as if to confirm that Duncan or Abed or somebody wasn't going to pop up. "No pressure. I like you, too, but last time...." He shrugged.</p><p>"Yeah, no," Britta agreed. She took a nervous step towards him. She'd lived with guys before, tried to do a no-strings-attached, friends-with-benefits thing before. She'd even tried to combine the two of them together, once. That had been a nightmare. His name had been Davit with a T and he had an accent and a band and he sold weed. He'd had some really bizarre expectations. She'd gotten in way over her head. "I mean," she said, "I wouldn't be cleaning for you." She took another step towards him.</p><p>"There's a maid service," Troy said. "Every Wednesday."</p><p>Another step. He could reach out and touch her now. "I definitely wouldn't be mincing around in whatever lingerie you give me, cleaning for you," she warned him, "and just...ready whenever you want me." Her breathing was shallow.</p><p>Troy squinted at her, like he couldn't quite believe what she was saying. Then his smile returned, like he was picking up what she was laying down. "Britta, babe?"</p><p>"I mean, maybe if you really, really want me to strip down and scrub the floors nude. And you ask me nicely. And it's your birthday."</p><p>"Weekly cleaners," Troy repeated, like he knew it was a dumb thing to say but he couldn't think of something better. "It's a company, so they have liability insurance, like if somebody breaks a TV or something, but I pay them cash and I give a hundred percent tip because the company pays them like a dollar over minimum wage..."</p><p>"Oh, God." Britta bit her lip. "Do you want me to just get down on my knees right now?"</p><p>NEXT: JEFF DOES LUNCH! BRITTA COMES CLEAN!</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Someday soon we all will be together,<br/>If the fates allow.<br/>Until then we'll have to muddle through somehow.<br/>Have yourself a merry little Christmas, now.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Driving Six White Horses</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The third week of January, Jeff felt well enough to make a phone call he'd been putting off for about two and a half years.</p><p>"Hey buddy!" Mark sounded as chipper as ever. "What do you need? Nuggets tickets? Should have asked sooner, they're claimed for the season. I can get you in to <em>Lucia di Lammermoor</em> in May."</p><p>"Hi Mark," Jeff said. "If I had called you up needing last-minute basketball tickets to impress some client, telling me about the opera five months from now would be really unhelpful."</p><p>"Note taken!" Mark was grinning, Jeff could tell from his tone. "So if you don't need tickets, what do you need? Want to catch up? Tell war stories? I haven't heard a peep from you in...three years? Yeah, man. Three years. And before that, it was I don't know how long. You're teaching now, right?"</p><p>"At the moment, yeah..."</p><p>"Well, it's great to hear from you but I'm supposed to be on another call right now as in right now--I saw it was you and I didn't want to miss it--so we should do lunch. Lunch?"</p><p>"Sure," Jeff said.</p><p>There was a series of clicks and then a woman's voice. "Mark Boyle's office, how may I help you?"</p><p>Jeff tried to remember Mark's assistant's name. The voice was the one he recognized, he was pretty sure. She'd been 'skinny blonde' in his mind, at the time. He couldn't very well call her that, though. Jeff cursed his younger self's reluctance to learn women's names. "Lauren," he said, hoping he was right. "Is that you?"</p><p>"Yes--Hello?" The woman--Lauren--sounded surprised.</p><p>"It's Jeff Winger." He wondered if she remembered him.</p><p>"Oh, wow!" Lauren purred. "Hi, Jeff. Wow."</p><p>Yes, she remembered him. "Mark had to get off the call in a hurry. He just transferred me to you to make lunch plans sometime soon."</p><p>"You and him, right?" Lauren's tone made it clear that while she didn't think for a second Jeff was calling her up to ask her out, she wouldn't have turned him down.</p><p>"Right. When's he free?"</p><p>Lauren hummed. "Tomorrow he's open from eleven to three. After that, I'm afraid he's booked for every weekday for the rest of the month..."</p><p>"Tomorrow's great," Jeff lied. He would have to cancel a lunch meeting with Craig. Craig would survive.</p><p>"Awesome. So good to hear from you, Jeff! What's your current email?"</p><p>Jeff gave her his private email, rather than his Greendale address.</p><p>"Wonderful," Lauren said, like the chance to update Jeff's email for Mark's address book was the best thing to happen to her all day. "You good with sushi?"</p><p>"Sure."</p><p>"Amazing, yes," cooed Lauren, and it was around this point that Jeff began to wonder if Lauren was sincerely pleased to hear from him or if she was just a habitual gusher of sweet enthusiasm over the phone. He felt vaguely embarrassed for not having immediately realized she was like this with everybody. She was client-facing, after all. It was like when your server at a restaurant feigned enthusiasm for your appetizer/entree/cocktail combination, even admiration for your pairing skill and refined palate. "Masamoto Garden, twelve o'clock, I just made the reservation online and I'll email you a confirmation."</p><p>"Thanks, Lauren."</p><p>"Thank <em>you</em>, Jeff! Have fun!"</p><p>Jeff sighed. He barely remembered Lauren. Did she remember him? She must, he decided. Maybe not especially fondly, but...</p><p>Lauren cleared her throat, and Jeff realized that she was still on the line and had been for several seconds now. "Was there something else you needed, Jeff? Anything at all?"</p><p>"Oh, no, thanks Lauren," Jeff said. "Uh, how are you?"</p><p>"Oh, you know. I'm working regular hours now, nine to six. I'm free most evenings, which is nice. Same old, same old."</p><p>"Uh huh," Jeff grunted.</p><p>"Sorry, Jeff, I can't really talk now," Lauren said, as though he'd asked her a question that required a detailed and verbose answer. "But maybe another time? Bye!"</p><p>"Bye." Okay, maybe she wasn't so friendly with <em>every</em> caller.</p>
<hr/><p>"...but then the husband comes back in, right, and he just wants to know about the car payment!" Mark laughed loudly.  "And you said, what was it?"</p><p>Jeff had never been to Masamoto Garden but he felt as if he had. It was smooth and beige and there was the sound of running water. Their server was a tiny Asian woman with an accent. She left a carafe of water on their table, to refill their own glasses. Once upon a time Jeff had eaten his lunches in places like this regularly, back when he had reason to be in the city center in the middle of the day, most days. "I said, 'sorry, you're going to have to get to the back of the line like all her other creditors,'" he recalled. "Then he threw a punch at me."</p><p>"Heh, yeah. Good times. We were so young. Helping divorcées and divorcée wannabes." Mark sighed happily.</p><p>"We did good," Jeff said reflectively. "Maybe not good but we weren't the bad guys."</p><p>"Not usually," Mark agreed. "You know, it's funny. Lauren, of all people, was asking about you yesterday. Whatever happened to Jeff, did he get married, any kids, that kind of thing. I told her you were teaching."</p><p>"Yeah?"</p><p>"And then you called, out of the blue, which was great, don't get me wrong. Weird coincidence."</p><p>"She set up this lunch meeting," Jeff reminded Mark. "I talked to her for a minute."</p><p>"No, but--" Mark broke off, thought for a moment. "Huh. Yeah. She asked me about you after. That makes sense. Was she the one that liked you, or was that Monica?"</p><p>Jeff shrugged. "You're asking me?"</p><p>"You made a strong impression on her at some point," Mark told him. "Either yesterday or, man, seven years ago? Is that right?"</p><p>"About," Jeff said grimly. He didn't like being reminded of the inexorable march of time. "I'm surprised Lauren's still working for you, actually."</p><p>"Lauren's great. She's also childless and as of last June, a divorcée herself. If you were wondering."</p><p>"I wasn't."</p><p>"All right, chief. I'm being a little silly, I know. I'm just happy to see you. It's been too long. This whole thing with the state bar goes down, you don't return my calls. Then you turn down a job offer because you want to start a solo practice, and the next thing I hear you're teaching. Been a rough one, huh?"</p><p>"For a while there," Jeff replied. He smiled. There was a time when Mark's overfamiliar attitude would have rankled Jeff. Years at Greendale had softened him, though. Actually, he'd been mostly softened before the second semester of the first year, as soon as he'd become enmeshed with Annie and the others. Since then it had been a back-and-forth as misfortune and anxiety hardened him, then camaraderie and love softened him again. Currently, he was feeling pretty well kneaded, and not in a bad way.</p><p>"Well, on the one hand, I'm glad you're doing better, since you seem to be. On the other, you could have called me sooner. You haven't had my cooking in I don't know how long, we've got to get you and a plus one over for dinner sometime."</p><p>"We?"</p><p>"Yeah, we. You haven't met Eleanor. I have a wife now--and a two-year-old, hold on..." Mark pulled out his phone and started pulling up pictures. "This is Julie." </p><p>Jeff leaned over, interested, and feigned interest for a few extra seconds after his initial curiosity was satisfied. Mark himself looked like some kind of wisened pastoral faerie, a forest-gnome who'd met the Devil at the crossroads and traded his red pointy hat for a nice suit. Nicer than Jeff's. His offspring seemed fully human, however.</p><p>"Cute baby," he said, because Mark probably expected it.</p><p>Mark beamed. "Thank you! I assume you don't have a baby or else you'd be telling me about them right now."</p><p>"That is true," Jeff allowed.</p><p>"And you let my 'plus one' reference pass without comment, so, you're single." Mark paused, in case Jeff wanted to correct him. "Like Lauren. Not that you should date Lauren. I'm just making observations."</p><p>"Yeah. I..." Jeff swallowed. Time to bite the bullet. "I had somebody for a while, but she took a job in D.C. this past August. Which was for the best," he added quickly. "We'd, uh, we'd been drifting apart for a while. I was holding her back."</p><p>Mark made a face. "Aw, Jeff, I'm so sorry. Let me buy you a drink."</p><p>"We're currently having lunch in a sushi restaurant without a liquor license," Jeff pointed out.</p><p>"Oh, right." Mark glanced around. "Later."</p><p>There were a few seconds of silence. Then Mark cleared his throat. "So," he began.</p><p>"Her name's Annie Edison. I met her when I started at the community college. She was fresh out of high school, I know what you're going to say, but no, we were just friends." Jeff stared at the empty spot in front of him where a tray of sushi would eventually be deposited. "For a long time, we were friends. She liked me, she made me feel better about myself. Like I could be the best version of myself, the one she saw, and that maybe that version of me wasn't as far from who I was now as seemed. And eventually, I realized I wasn't interested in anyone else. She took up that space for me for so long without--" He broke off, scowling.</p><p>"She did a number on you, huh?" Mark clucked his tongue sympathetically.</p><p>"I did a number on her, too. It was my fault, I didn't see what we were doing until it was too late. She got tired of waiting for me to realize we were closer than friends. And I proposed to someone else. That didn't help."</p><p>Mark's eyes widened. "You--Jeff Winger--proposed to someone?"</p><p>"Not the stunning personal breakthrough it sounds like," Jeff said, throwing his hands up. "I was a little crazy and not thinking clearly and I proposed to the wrong person and  when I calmed down I'd missed my chance with the woman I do love. Did, I guess. I don't even know."</p><p>"Neither of you are dead," Mark observed, "and it doesn't sound like she left you for another guy."</p><p>"Yeah, well. She gave me a lot of chances." Jeff knew he sounded defensive but Mark was irritatingly perceptive. "She's gone now. I drove her to the airport. She kissed me goodbye like she was coming back, then she didn't. We still have friends in common. She's doing well, of course. I haven't heard a huge amount but...she's amazing. Brilliant, dedicated. Probably she'll be the FBI director or something by the time she's forty."</p><p>"Sure. Sure, chief." Mark looked at him for a moment, like he was debating saying something more, but decided against it.  "Listen, I'm thrilled to hear from you, I am, but something tells me you called me up for a reason, and all the evidence available points to that reason not being so you can tell me about your ex you're still hung up on, or so you can flirt with my assistant, or even so you can ignore my assistant flirting with you because you're too hung up on your ex."</p><p>Jeff scowled. Mark wasn't wrong, of course. "Yeah."</p><p>"You getting tired of teaching?"</p><p>"Let's say I've been at Greendale one semester too many," Jeff replied. "At one point I thought I'd keel over and die in my office there, forty years down the line, but not so much these days. So yeah. I am indeed hoping you can throw me a bone with a referral or a contact or maybe something minor I can help you out with for a small fraction of your hourly billing rate."</p><p>"Well, I'm glad you thought of me." Mark might have said more, but their sushi arrived then, five rolls with names Jeff didn't remember and which Mark had rattled off to their server without glancing at the menu. They paused the conversation to eat quickly, an unspoken habit between them.  On the one hand the sushi was full of rice and rice was carbs. Jeff should have blocked the sushi, or at least ordered sashimi instead. But on the other hand, the sushi was delicious. Mark never steered him wrong when it came to food. It was half-eaten before Jeff even noticed that they'd done it the way they used to back in the day--talk until the food came, then eat in silence.</p><p>"I'm glad you thought of me," Mark said again once the sushi was mostly gone. "I can think of a couple of things you might be able to help with, if you're still decent at sweet-talking juries and little old ladies."</p><p>Jeff nodded. "I like to think so."</p><p>"All right. Tango! Tango's back! I'll email you later. We'll start out slow and see how it goes." Mark grinned. "Hopefully well. Hopefully this is the first of many sushi lunches for us in 2016." He held up a piece of a roll in his chopsticks, for Jeff to clink (well, tap) with another piece in his own chopsticks, a gesture that reminded him of Annie for some reason.</p><p>He hoped she was having good sushi of her own.</p>
<hr/><p>"So, I don't know, Abed." Shirley pursed her lips. Her webcam hung for a moment. "I told Brian that if he wanted me to stay he needed to give me a better reason. He doesn't need me to cook for him, not really. And I miss my kids. So unless he's prepared to have three boys living with him..." She shrugged.</p><p>"Spin-offs sometimes fail," Abed said gently. "Often. The television graveyard is full of them. For every <em>Frasier</em> there's a <em>Joey</em>, a <em>Gloria</em>, a <em>Phyllis</em>. <em>Flo</em>. <em>Fish</em>."</p><p>"<em>The Tortellis</em>," Shirley suggested.</p><p>Abed scoffed, slightly defensive. "Well, sure, if you want to include spin-offs with names that weren't just one word which was also the name of the main character. May as well say <em>AfterM*A*S*H</em>."</p><p>Shirley hummed. "<em>Knots Landing</em>. Though that wasn't unsuccessful, it went on forever. America loves its stories about rich white people who don't have real problems."</p><p>"True. <em>Golden Palace</em>."</p><p>"That was a sequel, not a spin-off," Shirley pointed out. "<em>Checking In</em>."</p><p>"A spin-off of a spin-off. Nice," Abed said appreciatively.</p><p>"Thank you." Shirley smiled.</p><p>"Me in LA," suggested Abed.</p><p>Shirley thought for a moment. "I don't remember that last one."</p><p>"Actual me, in actual Los Angeles," Abed explained. "I was only there for a few months. Then Troy convinced me to come back here."</p><p>"Well, your house is very nice," Shirley said. "I told Mr. Butcher all about it. He agrees with me that Pierce's portrait is definitely haunted, by the way."</p><p>"You called him Brian before," observed Abed.</p><p>"What? No." Shirley shook her head. "I <em>always</em> call him Mr. Butcher. 'Mister' might as well be his first name."</p><p>"In the story you were just now telling me, the one about how the romantic subtext between you and the male lead of your show was reaching a crisis point--"</p><p>Shirley was shaking her head. "Abed, please don't."</p><p>"You called him Brian several times."</p><p>"That was not what that story was about." Shirley closed her eyes for a quick, silent prayer. "But it looks like I'm going back to Greendale. I think it's an option, the numbers on Shirley's Sandwiches look...salvageable."</p><p>"That's what we all thought," agreed Abed.</p><p>"I'll have to find a place to stay, for me and the boys. Jordan is graduating from Riverside in the spring, he's going to be going to CU Denver, but Elijah still has two more years of high school to finish, and Ben's only in kindergarten."</p><p>"What about Andre?" Abed asked. "I thought he had the boys."</p><p>Shirley rolled her eyes. "Him and his new girlfriend. They want to move to Portland and sell retro electronics to hipsters. It's doomed. Anyway, I'll have the boys, I'm sure."</p><p>"You can move in here," Abed suggested.</p><p>"Abed, I--are you serious?"</p><p>He nodded. "There's a cluster of three bedrooms upstairs in the back, with a bathroom, and a little landing that's like a living room. It's not a separate apartment but it's as close as we have. Unless you count the pool house."</p><p>Shirley started to scoff but it turned into a thoughtful murmur halfway through. "I love you boys, and Britta too, but I think we'll need our own place. You aren't prepared for the full reality of living with teenagers."</p><p>"We all used to be teenagers."</p><p>"Still. That's a very generous offer, Abed. Thank you."</p><p>"When Troy sent you that key and said the house was yours as much as anyone's, he meant it," Abed said. "There's some paperwork for you to sign next time you're here. At least stay with us while you look for a place."</p><p>"I...okay, I'll stay with you again the next time I'm out." Shirley glanced away. Troy had said words to this effect, when she'd visited a month earlier. Hawthorne House was supposed, by Troy, to be shared equally among the six of them. Even if Jeff steadfastly maintained his own apartment and visited the house only occasionally (though to hear Britta tell it, he'd been there every weekend since <em>she'd</em> moved in, at least). And even if Annie had never been there.</p><p>Abed seemed pleased. "And bear in mind every house you consider, you will weigh against remaining with people who love you in a nine-bedroom manor house with a housekeeping service and wifi."</p><p>"It's 2016, Abed, they have wifi at the car wash by my--by Mr. Butcher's house." Shirley shifted in her seat, and changed the subject. "So you and Troy and Britta are there now, and Jeff pops in probably because he likes the private gym--"</p><p>"And the home theater."</p><p>"What about Annie? She still hasn't been back, has she?" Shirley hadn't spoken to Annie for weeks, but they were exchanging texts both privately and in the group text chain and in the other group text chain where she and Annie and Britta complained about patriarchy and racism to each other. Though that latter chain had been quiet, lately.</p><p>Abed shook his head no. "Annie is still in her own spin-off," he said. "It might have legs. She keeps rescheduling and delaying her trip back here. When we last spoke, she was pushing it back until almost May."</p><p>"Well, that's nice. For her, I mean." Shirley took a sip of her water. "She must be enjoying herself and her new life."</p><p>"Yeah." Abed sounded distracted, but he often did.</p><p>"Or..." Shirley trailed off, not wanting her speculation to get back to Annie. <em>Or she's really unhappy and she knows that if she goes home and sees you all, she won't be able to convince herself to leave.</em> "I'm sure she's doing well. She's Annie, after all."</p><p>Abed nodded solemnly. "She is."</p><p> </p><p>NEXT: BRITTA GETS REAL! ANNIE GOES TO THE MOVIES!</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>She'll be driving six white horses when she comes.<br/>She'll be driving six white horses when she comes.<br/>We'll kill the old red rooster!<br/>She'll be coming round the mountain,<br/>She'll be coming round the mountain when she comes.</p><p>Hey listen so I basically never bother to say so because I am lazy and take them for granted but without the team of beta readers I've got this story and indeed all my stories would be much weaker. Thanks to Bethanyactually, Amrywiol, and Raj_sound! Bethanyactually provided the original impetus for this story, as a matter of fact: somewhere on tumblr she complained about how all these found-family sitcoms always end with the main cast splitting up and going their separate ways, and while that's realistic it undercuts the show's premise of how the main cast friend group is a family, and why can't the study group just all live in one big house together or something? Now of course I've given away the ending. It'll be a while to get there though, because season six of Community ended with the study group scattered to the winds.</p><p>Have I mentioned lately how much I love to get kudos, and comments, and emails that tell me I've gotten kudos and emails that tell me I've gotten comments? Seriously, I love comments. Please leave me a comment. It can just be "okay fine i read it" or something like that, if you aren't moved to compose your own comment. Just copy and paste that! You know, if you want.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. A Thief Will Just Rob You</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Troy and Britta went on a date on Valentine's Day.</p><p>A week or two before, Britta had been complaining about men in general and her inability to muster interest in prospective men-in-her-life in particular. Troy was in his own special category, her platonic housemate whom she slept with a couple of times a week, for fun. But the Vaughns and Lukas and Duncans of the world wore down her interest in sharing her life with anyone she didn't currently live with. Definitely she wasn't looking to 'put in the work,' a phrase which bubbled up unbidden from some faint memory of a middle-school educational film that instructed, entertained, and reinforced the patriarchy.</p><p>"I mean, I love you guys," she told Troy and Abed, "but if you were living in LA or something instead of Greendale I would be sharing our old apartment with a cat lady I'd found in the roommates section of Craigslist."</p><p>Troy looked oddly nonplussed. "Oh," he said after a moment. "A lady with a lot of pet cats. Obviously. I knew that. It's a common phrase.</p><p>"Having known you as a woman with her own apartment, a woman with no apartment, and a woman with a third of my apartment," Abed said, "I concur that you are a cohabitation person. One of nature's roommates. It's nothing to be ashamed of; many people are. Most deal with it by marrying and having children so there will always be someone around you can yell at, assign chores to, and ignore when you don't want to deal with them." Abed paused as Britta and Troy made matching stricken faces. "Or love," he conceded. "Celebrate Christmas and birthdays with, build many happy memories. Et cetera."</p><p>"Well," Britta said after a moment, "be that as it may, men suck and it's not my fault they suck. Frankie has the right idea. Cut the people who suck out of your life, and just keep me and you and Annie. And Jeff. And you," she added, turning to Troy specifically. "Now that she knows you."</p><p>"Frankie also spends a lot of time with Craig," Abed pointed out. "And now that she's vice-dean of Greendale she's forced to interact with many people you think suck. Ben Chang. Ian Duncan. Mavis Purcell."</p><p>"Who?"</p><p>Abed's face tightened almost imperceptibly. "That one cafeteria worker you've been feuding with since 2009."</p><p>"Oh." Britta nodded when she realized.  "You mean Stink-Eye."</p><p>"Mavis was having a real hard time after her husband died," Troy said thoughtfully. "Maybe she'd like a gift basket."</p><p>"She's doing better now," Abed said. "She was when I left Greendale. My information may not be current."</p><p>Britta threw up her hands. This was getting off-track. "Okay, fine, Stink-Eye can have a gift basket, whatever. My point is, you asked me what my Valentine's plans were, and my answer is, men suck."</p><p>"Babe, are you saying you'd like to do something on Valentine's?" Troy asked gently. "Something romantic? You and me and Abed?"</p><p>"No! No, I--" Britta closed her eyes and tried to <em>will</em> Troy into understanding her. "You and me, I like what we have now, I like it a lot, but we're not do-something-on-Valentine's-together together. Like, you know..." She pointed at Abed.</p><p>"Troy and I aren't a couple, Britta," Abed said. "While human sexuality is a spectrum and we've both felt same-sex attraction in isolated incidents in the past, we both also identify as straight and the two of us don't experience a mutual sexual attraction."</p><p>"I know that! Ugh, you guys!" Britta rose from her seat and angrily crossed to the other side of the living room, then threw herself into a chair over there. She glared up at the portrait of Pierce as she folded her arms tightly across her chest. "I'm just, I'm starting to see that my future doesn't contain a lunkhead husband I don't really like and a stupid white picket fence and ugly flowerbeds and a fancy formal living room we never use, none of that stuff. And mostly, I'm fine with that. I don't want that stuff. I love you guys, I love living here, I'm finishing school at the end of the semester and starting a career I'm excited about."</p><p>"There's something you don't have that you want, though," Troy observed. "Something you don't think you're going to get."</p><p>Abed looked baffled.</p><p>Britta braced herself, then explained. "I want a baby. Which is stupid. I don't need a baby. This is a bad time for a baby. I don't need all the hassle. I just, I used to think the whole 'biological clock' thing was just made up to sell women magazines, like 'work-life balance' and 'eyebrow grooming' and junk."</p><p>"Well," Troy said slowly, "that's a pickle."</p><p>"I know. It's stupid. But whenever I see a baby, I'm like, ooh, I should pick that up and not put it down. Just steal it away." Britta leaned back in her seat and rubbed her temples for a moment before continuing. "I thought if I ignored it the urges would go away, like that weekend I thought it would be a good idea if you, Troy," she said, pointing to Troy to make it absolutely crystal clear she didn't mean Abed, "and Frankie and me had a threesome--"</p><p>"Wait, what?" Troy's eyes widened.</p><p>"I don't--I didn't want her to feel left out, and she's not about to move in here. And I was high. My point is, it's an impulse that went away once I had a good night's sleep. The baby thing's been on my mind since, God, before I moved in. Before Thanksgiving. I just want a baby."</p><p>There was a moment of silence while all this sunk in. Britta held her head in her hands.</p><p>"Shirley will be living with us soon. She could help with a baby," Abed suggested. "She already knows all the things you have to do to keep it alive. Give it milk. Don't let it use the internet unsupervised. Et cetera."</p><p>"Shirley's great, I love Shirley, but for a baby to happen a man has to be involved," Britta declared. "And that's where it all falls apart, right? Because men suck. Present company excluded."</p><p>"Men do suck," Troy agreed thoughtfully. "You could adopt. That's still a thing, right?"</p><p>"I can just picture going to the agency and explaining that..." Britta tried to pick one thing out of the miasma of chaos that was her life. "Explaining that I live with two single male roommates."</p><p>"In your house that you own," countered Troy. "'What's your rent-slash-mortgage payment? Zero dollars? Sounds like a smart lady who makes good choices is talking, and I'd better be listening! What's that? Your household has an annual income of--' I don't even know, the market fluctuates--but it's in the ballpark of four million or so? 'Wow! We can authorize you to take up to six babies!' That's counting what we're spending on the food bank, of course."</p><p>"Are we a household?" Abed asked seriously.</p><p>Britta ignored him. "It's your house, I just live here," she protested to Troy.</p><p>He shook his head. "It's your house as much as mine. We each own one-sixth of it. Or we will, as soon as I finish getting everybody to sign the paperwork. I think it's just Annie, is all that's left."</p><p>"Annie might not be interested in owning one-sixth of Pierce's old house," Abed said.</p><p>Troy shrugged. "She doesn't have to do anything except sign the paper. If she doesn't want it I can make her a tender offer for her share. But we're getting away from helping Britta with her problem."</p><p>"It's okay," Britta said. "I wouldn't want to use your money to cheat the system, anyway. If you're going to be rich you can at least not be a dick about it."</p><p>"It would be like stealing a baby, which is apparently your new thing, except that it wouldn't be so illegal," Troy said. "I mean, it's a big decision, not something to enter into lightly. We should talk to Shirley, since she's going to be living here, too."</p><p>"She says she's just going to stay while she finds her own place." Abed shrugged.</p><p>"Who wouldn't want to live with us?" Troy asked, almost indignantly.  "We're delightful!"</p><p>"That's what I told her," Britta said. "She asked me what living in Hawthorne House with you guys was like."</p><p>"You told her we were delightful, right?" Troy demanded.</p><p>Britta scoffed. "Duh doy, yeah. It's great."</p><p>"So it's settled," Abed said. "Shirley will move in, we're all delightful, and Britta will adopt a baby."</p><p>"It is not settled!" Britta cried. "I mean, is it fair to adopt a baby when there's probably a hundred thousand little orphan kids aged five and up that need homes? Do we not have a moral obligation to pack this mansion full of foster children? Should we sell this house and give the proceeds to the poor farmers of Guatemala? Should I stop using birth control?"</p><p>"I feel like the answers to some of those questions are easier than others," Abed said.</p><p>"I'm going to stop using birth control," Britta decided. "If I get pregnant, hey, that's my responsibility. Not yours," she told Troy.</p><p>"Why would it be my--oh, because I'd be the father. Right." Troy considered. "So either we stop having sex or I run the risk of knocking you up? But we still hang out and live in a mansion and have a lot of money either way?"</p><p>Abed cleared his throat. "Babies are expensive," he said. "So if Britta gets pregnant, and the pregnancy doesn't end prematurely, and a baby is born, that will cost some amount of money. It wouldn't be a significant dent in twenty-two million dollars, though."</p><p>"That number keeps going up," murmured Britta. "Stupid economic boom... Okay. I'll talk to Frankie about adoption. It just seems like something she'd know a lot about," she added when she saw Troy and Abed look confused. "Frankie's smart like that."</p><p>"If season-long arcs on sitcoms have taught me nothing else," Abed said, "I know adoption is a long and drawn-out process. Like pregnancies and weddings. But if late-season retoolings have taught me anything," he continued, "it's that children can be added to a cast on the flimsiest of pretexts."</p><p>Troy nodded absently, then turned back to Britta. "So, baby-making," he began.</p><p>"I'm not going to do any of that ovulation calendar, temperature-tracking stuff," she said immediately. "I just think that if I'm going to start looking into the possibility of pursuing the potential of adopting an infant or child, it would be hypocritical of me to also be using birth control."</p><p>"Hypocritical how?" Troy looked confused.</p><p>Britta opened her mouth to explain, realized she couldn't. "It doesn't matter," she said. "My body, my choice."</p><p>"Okay," Troy said. "So do you want to hang out on Valentine's? Abed's got a date, I don't want to be stuck here by myself."</p><p>"I'm meeting my ex for a tense but ostensibly platonic dinner that just happens to be on Valentine's Day, which will either become a heartwarming reconciliation or a nihilistic, parodic farce full of existential dread," Abed explained. "Either way it should be fun."</p><p>"Does she know what you--never mind, she dated you, she knows what she signed up for." Britta shrugged. "And yeah, we can hang out on Valentine's," she said to Troy. "It's just a day on the calendar. No big deal. We can order a pizza and watch a movie I pick and then a movie you pick, and when I get bored of the movie you pick I'll start taking clothes off. First mine, then yours."</p><p>"So, the usual Sunday night thing," Troy said with a smile. "Or we could have dinner someplace first, do the movies-and-clothes thing after."</p><p>"Ooh!" Britta lit up with a sudden thought. "We could invite Frankie!"</p><hr/><p>The first Saturday in March, Jeff woke to a voicemail from Annie.</p><p>"Hi, it's me."</p><p>The first thing Jeff registered was that Annie was using her I-just-finished-crying-but-I-don't-want-you-to-know-that tone. He could see her in his mind's eye, one hand holding her phone, the other shifting her hair out of her face where it had slipped, her big wet eyes blinking a little too much.</p><p>"I thought you might be up because it's, uh, it's still before midnight where you are. You might have seen it was me and not picked up, which would be fair, me calling you in the middle of the night after a hundred and twenty-six days of nothing. I have this app that reminds me of stuff, and it's said call Jeff every day for the last hundred and twenty-four days, I'm looking at it now and it's just ticked over to a hundred and twenty-five, and I programmed it in two days after so I guess a hundred and twenty-seven days. 'Call Jeff Winger In Case Of Emergency one two five days old,' it says. That's who you are in my phone. Jeff Winger In Case Of Emergency. Every day I tell it, remind me tomorrow. I guess I can put a check in the box now that I've called you. But this is a voicemail so maybe it doesn't count.</p><p>"I've been meaning to call you all this time to say I'm sorry. When I told you about the job offer and you weren't excited for me I was disappointed, and then you got mad, and I got mad, and we didn't talk until you tried to call me that last time, and I wasn't in a very good place then. I'm doing better now. I just broke up with my boyfriend."</p><p>Jeff's breath caught. He'd known she had a boyfriend, abstractly. Little bits of news passing from Annie to Shirley to Troy to him. But hearing it directly from her was different. He barely had time to react, though; she was on to the next topic almost immediately.</p><p>"There's a chance I can transfer out of the Pointless Paperwork department into the Actual Forensics department, so, fingers crossed. And, oh! I just saw, like, right before Josh and I broke up, so, it must have ended half an hour ago, it was the late showing, the theater sold beer and wine which was kind of novel...</p><p>"I just saw the best movie ever, it's amazing, you have to see it. Immediately. Please go see it. And then call me and tell me what you think about it, because it's basically a movie about us. Except you're a fox and I'm a bunny rabbit. It's so good!"</p><p>Annie's tone was shifting from her done-crying voice to her about-to-cry-louder-and-harder voice, Jeff could tell. He swallowed hard, his heart pounding at hearing her after so long. He could tell that she could tell she was going to start crying again, too, because she shifted gears quickly.</p><p>"Anyway the movie is called <em>Zootopia</em> and it's really sweet and it made me think of you and I miss you, so call me please? See the movie and call me. I can find showtimes near your apartment, if it'll help. You can do that. You don't need me to. I miss you love you bye!" The last part was all in a rush.</p><p>There was also a text message, but to the group chat: Annie asking if anyone else had seen <em>Zootopia</em> and declaring that it was a very cute movie she strongly recommended.</p><p>He texted Britta and Troy and Abed, explaining that he needed to see some dumb cartoon movie that day, did anyone want to go to a matinee of a cartoon movie with him last-minute, if nobody did he would have to buy a ticket for one and sit alone in a theater with a bunch of families who would think he was a child molester or something.</p><p>Fortunately Abed was up for it.</p><p>NEXT: ABED EATS IMITATION CRAB! ANNIE DRINKS COFFEE!</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>On top of Old Smokey, all covered with snow,<br/>I lost my true lover for courting too slow.<br/>For courting's a pleasure, and parting's a grief,<br/>And a false hearted lover is worse than a thief.<br/>For a thief will just rob you and take all you save,<br/>But a false hearted lover will lead you to the grave.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0007"><h2>7. Strumming on the Old Banjo</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>After the movie they had lunch at a Chinese buffet near the theater. When they sat down, Jeff had a plate of chicken with mixed steamed vegetables--bamboo shoots, baby corn, carrots, and a lot of broccoli. Abed's plate was just a pile of crab rangoons.</p><p>Jeff took a few bites before he broached the subject that had been on his mind since the movie's end. No doubt Abed would have thoughts on it. He cleared his throat, trying to ignore the embarrassment mounting. It was just a damn cartoon. "Were they a couple, at the end?"</p><p>Abed looked up and blinked owlishly at Jeff. "Nick and Judy?"</p><p>"Yes," Jeff snapped, harsher than he'd intended. "Nick and Judy. The fox and the bunny rabbit. The male and female leads of the movie we just saw. Were they a couple at the end?"</p><p>"Maybe," Abed said. "It seemed ambiguous. We saw them together, and then there was a time skip to the concert. They could easily have been a couple at the concert. Or not. I don't know if rabbits and foxes have romantic relationships in the setting. They're different species, and they're on opposite sides of the predator-prey divide."</p><p>"So maybe they're just good friends and there are big-picture issues outside their control that prevent any possibility of a relationship," Jeff said, trying not to sound like this theory had been eating at him for the last twenty minutes.</p><p>"Obviously they're close friends, and while pop culture tends to glorify monogamous romance as the only relationship worth pursuing, especially for men, satisfying and fulfilling emotional intimacy can be part of friendship." Abed paused to munch on a rangoon. "Look at me and Troy."</p><p>"What happened to that girl you were seeing?" Jeff asked him as he played with a wilted broccoli floret. "I heard you had a date on Valentine's. I spent Valentine's playing <em> Fallout 4 </em> at home."</p><p>"You could have found a date for the evening, if you had wanted to," Abed declared.</p><p>"Of course I could have," Jeff said, a little defensively. "I mean, look at me. I'm very handsome."</p><p>Abed made a show of setting his chopsticks down and staring across their table at Jeff. He shifted his head left and right, as though to take Jeff's face in from different angles. "You're right," he said at last. "Certainly you could get a Tinder date or something. Are you on Tinder, or is that for younger people?"</p><p>"Okay, you're baiting me," Jeff said, pointing at Abed with his chopsticks for emphasis. "It's not going to work, though. What happened to that girl you were seeing?"</p><p>"Our dinner moved quickly from farce to fiasco. She was expecting me to have assembled an elaborate apology scene. Instead I planned a simple and low-key homage to <em> How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days</em>."</p><p>"I haven't seen that," Jeff lied.</p><p>"Rachel likes it. It's not very good. My contempt for the source material bled through into my presentation and, long story short, she threw a glass of wine in my face and stormed out of the restaurant, leaving me with the check. A classic move on her part," Abed said flatly. "I was impressed."</p><p>Jeff shook his head slowly, struggling to process this. "Have you spoken to her since?"</p><p>"No." Abed ate another crab rangoon. "She has my number. She could call me. She hasn't, so she doesn't want to see me. In retrospect I saw our relationship through rose-colored glasses and made it out to be more than it was."</p><p>"I'm probably the last man in the world who should be giving romantic advice," Jeff responded carefully. "But--"</p><p>Abed held up a hand. "I'm going to stop you right there, Jeff."</p><p>He ate another crab rangoon.</p><p>"Abed?" Jeff asked after a suitable pause.</p><p>"Yes?" Abed peered at him. "Oh, no. No, I didn't have a rejoinder to your assertion. I just wanted you to stop talking before you completed that sentence. Because your love life has been a shambles for pretty much the entire time I've known you. Case in point, I was your date to a morning screening of the movie your platonic ex-girlfriend who called you up after months without contact demanded you see immediately."</p><p>Jeff sighed. He'd known Abed for a long time. Somehow Abed was one of his dearest friends, odd and closed-off though he could be. "Coming out of you all the stuff about me sucking seems…less credible than when I imagine Annie telling it to me."</p><p>"Do you think that's solely because your contrariness eclipses your self-loathing, or do you think it's something else besides that?"</p><p>"On this particular topic there's not anything you can say to me that hurts worse than things I've said to myself. Like I said, it doesn't even sound as bad when you say it, compared to…" He trailed off. "Doesn't matter." Jeff blinked a few times. "So you met Rachel and you had a nice time with her and then you never called her, and a year later you bumped into her again and that time you started a relationship that lasted until you abruptly moved away without telling her. And now you're back."</p><p>"We were discussing your shortcomings, Jeff." Abed ate another crab rangoon.</p><p>Jeff was shaking his head. "You have all these layers of artifice you use to keep people--even people who love you--at arm's length, and you thought that you and Rachel were on the same page about the state of your relationship. That you were just having a little fun together, nothing serious."</p><p>Abed scowled, just a bit. "Are you sure you're talking about me and her, and not you and--"</p><p>"No, no, I'm onto something here," Jeff declared. He jabbed at the space between them with his chopsticks for emphasis. "You want to pick up where you left off, but where you thought you left off isn't where she thought you left off, and she feels hurt and humiliated, probably two or three times over. She's given you two extra chances already, and you've blown it."</p><p>"Rachel is not the one great true love of my life and my sole shot at redemption, Jeff," Abed said tightly.</p><p>"Didn't say she was. But you probably owe her an apology. If for nothing else, then for creating a situation where she gave you a third chance and you botched it so badly she had to throw wine in your face," he cut a little arc in the air with one finger, "to save face. Which you say you liked."</p><p>Abed had turned his head ninety degrees and was staring intently at the wall next to their table. "It was impressively dramatic."</p><p>"Of course, I could be wildly off-base in thinking she deserves an apology. I barely know Rachel, because you went out of your way to avoid enmeshing her in our friend group. Does she even know where you live now?"</p><p>Abed shook his head no without looking Jeff's way. He studied the plasticky wood grain of the plasticky paneling. "It's probably too late to patch things with her now," he said. "It's been three weeks."</p><p>"Probably, yeah." Jeff, feeling his job was done, turned his attention back to his plate of steamed vegetables. "Closure might be good."</p><p>"Is that why we went to a ten AM showing of <em> Zootopia</em>?" Abed turned to look at Jeff now. "For the sake of closure?"</p><p>"If you talk to Rachel--"</p><p>Abed silenced him with a wave of his hand. "We're done discussing Rachel now. You've made your point. Let's move on to the main event. You didn't call me to see a cartoon about a cute bunny cop because of Rachel."</p><p>Jeff sullenly ate some broccoli before responding. "You're right," he said. "Annie left me a voicemail last night, saying…several things. One of which was that I should see <em> Zootopia</em> and call her." He swallowed. "Another was that she'd just dumped her boyfriend."</p><p>"She broke up with Josh?" Abed sounded mildly surprised.</p><p>"His name was Josh?" Jeff straightened up in his seat. Of course Abed would know. It wasn't like Annie had been keeping it a secret from the group at large. "I never knew his name. I just knew she was seeing a guy." He sipped his water. "She'd started seeing him in July or August, is what I've pieced together. She never told me about him. Until last night, when she said she'd just dumped him."</p><p>"Annie started dating Josh, very tentatively, in early September of last year," Abed said. "I could have told you this, if you'd asked."</p><p>Jeff stared at his plate of food. Early September would have been <em> after</em> the call, when she'd told him she wasn't coming back. But maybe she'd met him before then, even if she'd delayed starting a relationship until after. "It's none of my business," he said quietly.</p><p>"But now that relationship is over," Abed observed, "and she wants to talk about <em> Zootopia</em> with you. You just gave me unsolicited relationship advice. Would you like me to return the favor?"</p><p>"If you ask me that first, is it still unsolicited? But sure." Jeff shrugged. "She's a long ways away and she hasn't been back to visit. I don't think there's anything I can do to…I don't even know what I would be trying to do." </p><p>Jeff stared off into space for a moment. "I want her to be happy and successful, and that currently involves living in a different time zone from me. Her life is going in a direction pointed away from here. I wouldn't <em> want</em> her to come back here, tail between her legs, full of regrets. And I'm not about to pull up stakes and relocate on…not even a slender reed of a chance. It'd be too much, me following her out there, even if she thought she wanted me to. And I have friends here. I have a life here. I'm working with Mark again. So, that's the deal. If I can get the occasional call to talk about a movie, maybe a text message on my birthday, I'll take it."</p><p>"I don't have any advice," Abed admitted. "I hoped something would come to me while you were blathering, but nothing did. You deserve happiness and you shouldn't rely on somebody else to give you that happiness, you need to go out and get it and give it to yourself."</p><p>Jeff chuckled. "Thanks, Abed. You're a good friend."</p><p>"So are you."</p><hr/><p>Annie Edison was feeling fine. <em> Feelin' </em> fine, even. It was a sunny, crisp day in early spring, the temperature in the mid 40s. Coat and hat weather. Strolling through the park weather. Drinking a latte from a coffee shop and toying with the idea of going to see a matinee of <em> Zootopia</em> (even though she'd seen it the night before) weather.</p><p>When her relationship with her first boyfriend had ended, it had barely registered. She'd been in a bad place that had little to do with him, and much more to do with an amphetamine addiction she couldn't control. Thinking back, Annie wasn't sure if he'd dumped her or she'd dumped him. It had hardly mattered, even at the time. Everything had been fuzzy.</p><p>When she'd abruptly ended things with Vaughn--telling him to pull over at the next exit, they needed to turn around so he could drop her off--he'd been confused and hurt and she'd narrowly avoided being stranded at a rest stop east of Denver. At that point she'd had other things on her mind than heartbreak. His obvious bitterness at their parting led to some recrimination on her part; she didn't like to see herself as a user of men, who took what she wanted and tossed them aside.</p><p>The next relationship after that…there had been so many false starts and false endings and a lot of hurt and confusion. She certainly hadn't taken what she wanted and then tossed Jeff Winger aside. The opposite was…not true, but at least a little close to the truth. Then she'd stood there in that underground bunker with a magic computer. She remembered feeling a sense of peace, a clarity of vision.</p><p>There were other occasions, of course, when she hadn't been so calm about her relationship with Jeff Winger and its status. Some of them had been that same day. But that was the one she chose to remember as the end of the relationship-such-as-it-was.</p><p>At the movie theater the night before, she'd stayed in her seat as the rest of the audience filed out during the closing credits. Josh sat with her, confused, until the house lights came up. Then she'd turned to him, feeling that same sense of peace she'd experienced when they'd confronted Dr. Borchert. She'd told him they were over, and he hadn't been surprised.</p><p>He'd been upset, yes. But not surprised. Their relationship had been wheezing along because she hadn't mustered the strength to tell him she was ending it. To tell him to let it come to its overdue conclusion. He'd been mad at her for dragging things out and giving him false hope (it felt weird, trying to imagine being in his shoes, to imagine <em> wanting </em> Annie Edison with all her faults and anxieties). But he hadn't tried to argue with her about whether they were over. He hadn't tried to talk her out of it.</p><p>He had seen, in the six months they'd been together, how upset she could get over small things. Josh had been there the time she'd burst into tears over not being able to find the remote control to the television. He was with her when she had a very minor, hardly noticeable breakdown at some office party after an acquaintance asked about where she'd gone for undergrad. Once she'd dropped a pen and it had rolled under a radiator where she couldn't quite reach it and she had been inconsolable for a few minutes.</p><p>Things hadn't been great for her, in the fall. But she'd adapted! She'd gotten the hang of it. After years of eschewing all possible treatments for her mental health, she'd started taking anti-anxiety medication under a physician's direction, and it had worked well, and she'd gradually started to excel again. She'd reached out to the friends back home that she had been keeping her distance from (with the one obvious exception). She'd made plans for the future that she was excited about, timelines of career advancement and goals. She hadn't been so looking forward to the next steps in her life plan since she didn't know how long. Not since she first went back to Greendale and started taking forensic classes and hanging out with Jeff again.</p><p>And when she'd sat, listening to the end song and watching the credits and processing the movie she'd just seen, she hadn't cried at all. She'd teared up several times during the movie itself, at some of the dramatic bits. The way the bunny buried her head in the much taller fox's chest, in the scene when they were reunited and the bunny cried. The bit at the climax where they were pressed against each other, hugging tightly, grinning smugly at the villain they had just worked together to outsmart. The bits that reminded her of certain events in her own past.</p><p>Annie hadn't cried when her relationship with Josh ended. She'd cried a little afterwards, and then she'd called Jeff because her phone told her to, and then she'd cried a little more after that. By some standards that was basically zero crying.</p><p>And today she felt good. Today the world was bright and fresh and open and she was young and healthy and strong, and…</p><p>Her phone rang, interrupting the <em> Zootopia </em> soundtrack she was playing on her earbuds as she marched through the park and drank her Starbucks. She felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up and her breath caught. It was her default ringtone, which meant that it wasn't Abed or Troy or Shirley or Britta or Frankie or Craig or Elroy or George or Deb or Anthony (who never called her anyway). One night about a year ago she'd recklessly assigned custom ringtones to everybody she could think of. Except Jeff, because she didn't think there was one individual song that summed up how she felt about Jeff and if there was she didn't want other people to hear it.</p><p>Probably it was just a telemarketer. Annie stepped off the path, out of the way of joggers, and screwed her eyes shut. She pulled the phone from her pocket and held it up, then slowly opened her eyes again. <em> Jeff Winger In Case of Emergency. </em> She felt a rush of…excitement? Fear? Dread? She wasn't even sure.</p><p>Annie answered cautiously, in case somehow the caller ID was mistaken. "Hello?"</p><p>"Hi, Annie."</p><p>"Hi, Jeff!" Annie said brightly. She was pleased to hear his voice, she realized. She really hadn't been sure how she was going to react. But she'd called him and left a voicemail (she only loosely recalled what she'd said, probably just gushing about <em> Zootopia </em>) and here it was not twenty-four hours later and he was calling her back!</p><p>"So, <em> Zootopia</em>, huh?"</p><p>"God, yes!" Annie replied quickly, without thinking. "You have to see it, Jeff! You have to!"</p><p>"Yeah, that's what you said."</p><p>"Okay. Okay," she said, and tried to think how best to sell it to him. "It's about this fox and this rabbit and they work together to solve a mystery and they fall in love!"</p><p>"Do they?" He sounded dubious.</p><p>"Yeah, I mean, that part is just your basic rom-com arc, really--"</p><p>"I wasn't really looking for it, there might have been mixed-species couples in the crowd scenes, but all the couples that the movie introduced were single-species. The bunny's parents, the otters, the mice…"</p><p>"Well, Gazelle is obviously a sex symbol across all the species," Annie replied. "Predator and prey. Lions and sheep and probably dolphins, they all think Gazelle is hot, so if--wait, wait! You've <em> seen </em> it?! Already?!"</p><p>"Yeah. I saw it this morning with Abed. You told me to see it, and then call you, so I saw it, and now I've called you." He was irritated, like she'd wheedled a major concession out of him. </p><p>Jeff Winger, king of the mixed messages. He'd drop everything to call her up and then head off any chance that she feel special, God forbid, by complaining about calling her up. "Well, thank you," she said.</p><p>"You're welcome." He sounded more satisfied now, like they'd just had a tussle and he'd emerged on top.</p><p>"So what did you think about the bunny and the fox? Weren't they just…" She trailed off, trying to find the word. "Relatable?"</p><p>"Yeah. I can see why you wanted me to see it. It's not really my kind of thing; I don't go in for adorable cartoon character heroines, present company excepted. But it's cute." Jeff made a noise like there was something else he wanted to say, so Annie didn't respond immediately to his calling her a cartoon character. "The way the first part of the movie showed us the bunny's life story and all the adversity she overcame to become a meter maid, I liked that. And I liked the way she was upset about being a meter maid but she threw herself into it anyway. And then there was a chase sequence…" He trailed off, perhaps because if he kept on listing his favorite bits he would just give a recap of the movie. "I liked the relationship between her and Nick. The fox," he added unnecessarily.</p><p>"Yeah. That was my favorite part, too," Annie said.</p><p>Jeff didn't respond immediately. Annie sipped her coffee.</p><p>"Jeff, I--" she began.</p><p>"What do--" he started to say at the same time.</p><p>She smiled and fell silent again. So did he.</p><p>"Okay, so--" she said after a moment.</p><p>"If I--" he said at the same time.</p><p>"You go," Annie told him. "You go. Otherwise we'll just do that all day."</p><p>"Okay," he said. She could hear him bracing himself. "I've heard through the grapevine that things are looking up a little for you. That this fall was rough but you've found your legs. I was really glad to hear that." </p><p>"Thanks," Annie said, a little taken aback by how sincere and friendly and warm he sounded. She'd always been a sucker for him when he sounded sincere. "It was hard for a while, yeah."</p><p>She bit her tongue, to avoid telling him that it wouldn't have been so hard if he hadn't called her when he did, thrown her off-kilter the way he had, forced her to reevaluate her choices when she did. He probably wouldn't have believed her, that their brief conversation in October followed by icy silence could have had such an effect on her. He'd never really understood the effect he had on her.</p><p>"And you said in the voicemail you left last night, you're transferring out of the Pointless Paperwork department to the Real Forensics department?" </p><p>Annie sucked in her breath. She didn't recall mentioning that on the voicemail. What else had she said and immediately forgotten? "Yeah," she said cautiously.</p><p>"That's got to be a good thing," Jeff continued. "You obviously aren't the pointless paperwork type. All your paperwork is always extremely pointed."</p><p>"You think?" Annie smiled, pleased. She wasn't really sure what he meant but his tone seemed heartfelt and complimentary. "I applied for the transfer. I took this job so that I could apply for the transfer. If I don't get it this round I'll get another chance in the fall. This time is more of a long shot anyway, because I don't have a full year there yet. But I think I'm a credible candidate." Annie thought back to the interview, and the somewhat awkward post-interview conversation. "They acted like I was, when I interviewed. The woman who interviewed me said I was a strong candidate despite, you know, everything."</p><p>"Because you <em> are </em> a strong candidate," Jeff said, as if this were obvious. "When will you know?"</p><p>"Not for a few weeks. I'll let you know."</p><p>"If you don't get it this time you'll get it next time," he assured her.</p><p>She was grinning, now. "Thanks for the vote of confidence."</p><p>"Will getting the…you haven't called it a promotion, the new job? Will getting the new job affect your travel plans, one way or the other? I've heard you're coming out in about two months."</p><p>"End of April, yeah. Theoretically I'm having Passover Seder with my family. I'll be staying with Troy and Abed, though. And Britta. And maybe Shirley? Shirley and her kids are supposed to be moving in, next week I think? Or are they going to just be there short-term?"</p><p>"I don't even know. It's a whole big house," Jeff said. "You remember how big Pierce's house was. And Troy's fixed it up so you wouldn't recognize it. It's nice. There's a suite set aside for you. They put all your stuff in it."</p><p>"Yeah, Britta sent me some pictures and asked if I wanted it painted before I got there or after. Frankie, you know--Frankie said Troy is a cult leader and Britta has fallen under his charismatic sway. Her words."</p><p>There was another of those awkward pauses, and for a moment Annie thought Jeff was going to throw a tantrum about how she'd been talking to everybody except him. But instead he just made a thoughtful noise. "Troy does have guys in jumpsuits who do stuff for him. Plumbers and HVAC repair people and electricians. Something to do with the AC-repair annex. Remember that?"</p><p>"Oh, yes!" Annie laughed. "They saved us when Ben Chang tried to murder us. How's he doing?"</p><p>"Chang? About the same."</p><p>"Aw, poor guy." Annie clucked her tongue sympathetically. "And how about you? How are you doing, Jeff?"</p><p>"I'm hanging in," he said with a slightly forced breeziness. "I've been doing some legal work outside the school, consulting."</p><p>"Yeah? How'd that happen?"</p><p>"Swallowed my pride, called Mark. He was thrilled, actually. Turns out I'm as valuable a team member now as ever."</p><p>"Mark," Annie repeated, pleased on Jeff's behalf. "That's great."</p><p>"Maybe I can parlay it into something with enough hours that I can quit teaching," Jeff continued. "Ditch Greendale."</p><p>"Oh, but you love Greendale," Annie reminded him.</p><p>He scoffed. "I've told you before, that's not true. I love--I love some of the people, most of whom are gone. From the old group it's just Britta right now, maybe Shirley when she reopens the sandwich stand. But it's not like we meet regularly in the study room. Abed and Troy are in town, I mean, I see them all the time, and not because of Greendale."</p><p>"Well." Annie was suddenly unsure what to say. "I should be honored you're choosing to follow in my footsteps, then. Moving on to something else. Keeping the people you love close…" She winced as soon as the words were out of her mouth. "I mean, telephonically, if not in person. I miss--I miss all you guys. I'm really looking forward to seeing everybody at Passover."</p><p>"Right." Jeff's voice had gotten a little tense. "We're all looking forward to seeing you, too."</p><p>They chatted for a few more minutes, avoiding topics like who was more responsible for the two of them not talking to one another for six months (one disastrous phone call aside), whether Annie's decision not to return home at the end of last summer had been the correct one, or anything else fraught. Annie extracted a promise from Jeff that they would talk again soon, no more than a week later. And then it seemed like they were done, though Annie could have talked to him for another hour at least. It was only after the call was done, and Annie was looking at the time and wondering how it had gone so fast, that she realized she'd neglected to tell him about Josh. He hadn't asked but it seemed like something he would want to know. But then, he hadn't volunteered anything about <em> his </em> love life, and she hadn't asked, either. </p><p>She was pretty sure Britta or Shirley would mention it if they knew anything, but Jeff Winger could be circumspect when he wanted to. Not that it was her business. That ship had sailed. Multiple times, and before that there had been a bunch of PA announcements warning that the ship had finished boarding and would any remaining passengers get on board ASAP. Now they were just friends. Good friends.</p><p>Good, awkward friends, who avoided certain topics of conversation like they were unexploded ordnance.</p><p> </p><p>NEXT: SHIRLEY DRINKS A COFFEE! MARK SPINS A TALE!</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Someone's in the kitchen with Dinah,<br/>Someone's in the kitchen, I know.<br/>Someone's in the kitchen with Dinah,<br/>Strumming on the old banjo.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0008"><h2>8. And the Doctor Said</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Late March in Greendale was the season of the post-Saint Patrick's Day recriminations. Days were finally getting a little bit warmer and a little bit brighter, even if the world was still cold and gray and the wildflowers weren't blooming yet. Everybody whose New Year resolutions had included rigorous self-improvement had already gone through the cycle of effort, neglect, abandonment, recommitment, and reabandonment, so the gyms were quieter even though the weather didn't yet support outdoor exercise as much as it would later in the year.</p><p>Cardboard shamrocks and leprechauns and pots of gold were taken down from bulletin boards all over Greendale's campus, replaced with cardboard bunny rabbits and flowers and eggs that were reminiscent of Easter without committing to anything religious.</p><p>And, as green shoots of new life and renewal began, slowly, to push forth from the cold dark places of the world, so too did Shirley's Sandwiches rise from the dead.</p><p>"I would say I appreciate you making the attempt to keep the sandwich counter operating, Britta," Shirley said gently, "but lying is a sin, and it would just be an insult to both of us."</p><p>"Okay." Britta had never claimed to be a competent steward of Shirley's business. When the sandwich shop had closed for winter break at the end of its first semester without Shirley, Britta had always <em> meant </em> to reopen, eventually. She’d had a lot going on, these last sixteen months.</p><p>"In Britta's defense, I looked over the numbers and she was losing money every time she opened the counter," Frankie said. "Also, complaints about food poisoning dropped nearly forty percent after she closed down. Though some might say there are still too many. I'm told one of the cafeteria workers has been having a hard time of it this year."</p><p>"Stink-Eye?" Britta asked eagerly. "Her husband died?"</p><p>"I don't know who that is." Frankie stared at Britta a moment. "I'm talking about Mavis Purcell. Her house burned down and her dog died in the fire and apparently it was some kind of service or support animal--I sympathize. I do. I don't doubt it's a lot to deal with, but it's no reason to disregard expiration dates. They exist for a purpose beyond simply prettying up food container exteriors with aesthetically pleasing alphanumerics."</p><p>Britta looked down at her shoes. "Yeah, well. It's an easy mistake to make."</p><p>"Britta, were you poisoning our customers?" Shirley sounded more amused than annoyed. Really, she hadn't expected much.</p><p>"You know," replied Britta, "you could look at it two ways. Was I poisoning people by serving them sandwiches made with spoiled condiments I didn't think to refrigerate, or did I heroically prevent the poisonings of all those people who would have eaten there in the spring, or this year, if I had reopened?"</p><p>The three women stood in an amiable conversational knot next to the counter, early the morning after the reopening. One of Shirley's sons, Jordan, stood behind the counter in a hairnet, phone in hand. He was ready to make sandwiches on command and in the meantime juggling text messages from sexy teenage girls, or whatever it was that eighteen-year-old boys did with their phones.</p><p>The first customer of the day was a mild woman named Samantha whose physique and personality could both be summed up as 'suety.' She taught some kind of introduction to basic physical chemistry class that Shirley had never tried to take, the concept sounding too intimidating. As Samantha nervously approached the counter, Shirley took an involuntary step forward, to intervene. Britta's hand on her shoulder stopped her, however. </p><p>"You have to let him learn to do it alone," Frankie told Shirley solemnly. "I'm led to believe that's a vital part of motherhood, especially of teenagers."</p><p>"Yeah, you don't want to smother him," Britta agreed.</p><p>Shirley made a grunting sound that may or may not have been intended to convey <em> yes! thank you! thank you so much, you two! as a pair of childless white women, at least one of whom might not be entirely heterosexual, you are precisely who I, as a traditionalist and a nonwhite mother of three, need to instruct me on how to best raise my children. </em></p><p>But she stood by and watched as Samantha ordered a "classic plus" breakfast sandwich with chorizo sausage and a cup of coffee. Jordan took her money first, just as Shirley had taught him, then busied himself making the sandwich. By the time he was done there were two more people waiting to order. He ably juggled taking new orders with making sandwiches, ensuring that no one had to wait so long they lost their patience.</p><p>"You see?" Frankie seemed to think Jordan's success was a vindication not so much of Shirley as a mother, as of Frankie as an advisor to Shirley. "He's very capable."</p><p>"And he remembers to put the milk back in the fridge every time," Britta pointed out. "I mean, <em> every </em> time. That's great! He's great."</p><p>"Let's walk around the quad, let Jordan work without any of us looking over his shoulder and making him nervous," Frankie suggested.</p><p>"I know I get nervous when Frankie looks over my shoulder," Britta said. "The, what's it called, the stress of her regard."</p><p>Shirley blinked. "What?"</p><p>"It's from a poem," Britta said, slightly defensively. </p><p>"'Silence, a rigorous Medusa, turns/On the lost world the stress of her regard,'" Frankie recited.</p><p>Shirley looked at Frankie, then at Britta, then back at Frankie. "That's nice," she said, insincerely. "I guess."</p><p>"Because having somebody looking at you can make you nervous," Britta explained.</p><p>"Yes, thank you Britta, I got it." Shirley shook her head. "I'm going to get some more coffee, either of you want more coffee?"</p><p>"God yes," Frankie said. So Shirley stepped behind the counter and quietly served up three cups of coffee--Britta hadn't said she'd wanted any, but if Shirley and Frankie were both doing something, it would be only natural for Britta to feel compelled to follow along. Then Shirley took the coffee out and away and led Britta and her weird but likable friend-or-whatever (Shirley didn't judge) from the cafeteria to the quad.</p><p>"So, Shirley," Frankie said, once the three of them were alone together on the concrete sidewalk between buildings. "I know you haven't been there long, but how are you enjoying Hawthorne House?"</p><p>"Frankie thinks it's a cult," Britta said.</p><p>Shirley hummed. "I've known Troy for a long time," she declared. "If he were starting a cult I think I'd notice. He's never compared himself to Jesus in front of me. Unlike some people."</p><p>"That was one time," grumbled Britta.</p><p>"I was thinking of Abed."</p><p>"And I was high," Britta continued as if she hadn't spoken. "And I was engaged in some <em> very </em> Christlike behavior."</p><p>"Oh. Yes. I remember. This was years ago," Shirley told Frankie. "We were trying to minister to prostitutes." </p><p>"I told you, those women were not prostitutes!" Britta took an angry sip of her coffee. "They were just dressed slutty! Because of internalized misogyny and the male gaze!"</p><p>"That sure was a story!" Frankie said brightly, in hopes of derailing this derailment. "When Abed told me about you moving in, Shirley, he said that you might be there only temporarily, but he was hoping you and your sons would be residents over a longer term."</p><p>"It is a very nice house," Shirley conceded. "And big enough for multiple families."</p><p>"I thought he might want to set it up as multiple units," Frankie said. "There's space for three, maybe even four decently-sized apartments."</p><p>"But then we wouldn't have our one big kitchen," Britta protested. "One big kitchen!" she chanted. "One big kitchen!"</p><p>"One big kitchen that it's not my job to clean." Shirley cast a sidelong glance at her longtime friend. </p><p>"Yeah, okay," Britta conceded, "we are still hammering out how some of us have different definitions of what constitutes 'basically clean,' exactly… Bbut we'll get it!"</p><p>"If you're leaving the kitchen, just ask yourself, is it in the same state you found it? Look at all the surfaces. Are they clean? Is the sink cleared of dishes? How hard is that?" Shirley shook her head. This wasn't the time to discuss it. "I do like the house," she said, turning back to Frankie. "It's big enough that it doesn't always feel like Troy and Abed and Britta…or anyone's breathing down anyone's neck. Back at Mr. Butcher's house there was plenty of space for the two of us, but when the boys visited…that was a change."</p><p>"It sounds like Abed's scheme to entice you into permanent residence might not be the impossible dream that I first assumed it was, when he laid it out for me," Frankie observed. "Assuming kitchen cleaning doesn't become a wedge issue."</p><p>"Oh, I don't know. I have an appointment this afternoon to see a realtor, and I'm not even sure what my price range is going to be. Much as I love you all," Shirley said, turning towards Britta specifically, "I'm sure we'll all be happier if I'm raising Ben someplace you don't have to see him every day."</p><p>"What?" Britta, to Shirley's surprise, looked crushed. "I love Ben! I delivered Ben!"</p><p>"I know, I was there."</p><p>"I mean, obviously, you're his mom." Britta sighed. "And if you think that I'm a bad influence because I never had anybody to teach me right from wrong, like, a strong maternal influence in my life? I guess I understand."</p><p>"Britta," Shirley said primly, "you know I love you. And you have a very strong moral compass. It's just not one well-calibrated to the day-to-day life of a kindergartener. More one about large-scale social issues. The only common factor I can think of, off the top of my head, is avoiding the police."</p><p>Frankie looked confused. "Avoiding the…?"</p><p>"I'm the mother of two black teenage boys," Shirley reminded Frankie. "Tamir Rice? Michael Brown?" She saw that Frankie still wasn't getting it. "I don't want them hurt. Or locked up."</p><p>"Oh, well, no, of course, nobody does," Frankie said with the artless tone of someone who knew she was badly out of her depth and would prefer to return to real estate and coffee and other less fraught topics. "How about that Donald Trump, huh?"</p><p>Britta snickered derisively. "I hope he doesn't drop out and he wins the nomination and then he loses to Hilary Clinton by <em> millions </em> of votes."</p><p>"That's short-sighted," Shirley said with a scoff. "When she's president you know they're going to say anything to hurt her. 'She only got elected because her opponent was a narcissistic clown of a con-artist rapist,' that kind of thing. The sooner he gets bored and quits, the better for all of us."</p><p>"Okay, whew," Frankie said. It had occurred to her as soon as the name Donald Trump was out of her mouth: the path directly from Trump to politics in general to abortion rights specifically, and if there was one social issue Britta and Shirley were likely to be on opposite sides of, it was abortion rights. This was why Frankie didn't talk about politics. "If we all agree on that, what's something else we can talk about?"</p><p>There was a moment of silence. The women sipped their coffees.</p><p>"We all like Annie," Britta suggested. "She's finally coming back to visit next month," she added (unnecessarily, as Frankie and Shirley each had Annie's itinerary programmed into their phones).</p><p>"Did she talk to you about her new thing, that movie?" Shirley asked. "She asked if she could take Ben to see it while she's here, and I said he's seen it, and she said that it really rewards repeat viewings."</p><p>"She made Jeff see it opening weekend," Britta recalled.</p><p>"Sorry, she 'made' Jeff see it?" Frankie asked.</p><p>Shirley nodded. "Jeff does whatever Annie tells him to," she said, as if she were reminding Frankie of a truism that they'd all learned as children.</p><p>Frankie scoffed. "Not always."</p><p>"Yeah, always." Shirley raised one eyebrow. "I thought you and Annie and Jeff spent time together, with Britta and Abed, while I was gone. Did you just not pay attention? I admit I sometimes tune them out…"</p><p>"Well, to be fair, last year Jeff was drinking more--he was really mopey--and he and Annie weren't hanging out as much," Britta said. "At the time I didn't really connect those dots."</p><p>"So, what did Annie want Jeff to do that he didn't?" Shirley challenged.</p><p>Frankie bit her lip. "It's not like I can think of anything Annie wanted me to do, or Britta to do, that we didn't," she said after a moment. "You've all said there used to be some layer to the two of them that I never saw. I never saw it. Maybe once at that wedding."</p><p>"Well, if there's not any new information," Shirley said with a sigh, "then I'm already bored. Let's not rehash the Jeff-Annie thing. There's got to be more going on."</p><p>Silence fell again over the three women as they ambled together through the quad. Some kids--somehow, at 35, Britta had finally crossed the threshold beyond which she saw undergraduates as kids--were playing hacky sack in the mud. It was overcast, and might start to gently drizzle at any time.</p><p>Britta cleared her throat. "So I have been smoking pot less often, but nevertheless--"</p><p>"Britta's going to be taking--" Frankie said at almost the same time. She broke off, then tried again, more firmly. "Britta's going to be taking a foster-parent class starting next week. I assume you know she's looking into becoming a foster parent?"</p><p>"Yes," Shirley said in the guarded tone of a person who didn't want to field any follow-up questions about how she felt about Britta becoming a foster parent but wasn't sure she could avoid it unless she shifted the conversation to the even less appealing topic of Britta's views on marijuana.</p><p>"You have to take this class," Britta said quickly, "it's a whole long thing. But, you know, pregnancy is nine months, then there's the first couple of years where it just sits there and cries, so, best-case scenario,  it's several years before you have an actual little person you can interact with. So fostering is definitely faster than that."</p><p>"Children are a huge responsibility, and I haven't yet trusted you with babysitting Ben solo." Shirley eyed Britta dubiously. "I mean, I'm sure Troy and Abed will do their best to help, but…we all know Troy and Abed."</p><p>"I know, I know. And I know that this is my—project I guess," Britta said. "Not yours. I'll appreciate whatever parenting advice you have, until I get really resentful about how you come in and act like it's all so easy and obvious."</p><p>"Well, I'll be moved with compassion, both for you and for the poor foundlings in your care," Shirley said. "At least until I get frustrated about how you refuse to take some of my simplest, most directly helpful advice."</p><p>"I'm going to be struggling!" Britta cried. "The last thing I'm going to need is a lecture about how I'm failing. I'm gonna know exactly how I'm failing, believe me."</p><p>"Britta, honey, I'll just be trying to help. I'll know that you will only lash out at me because you'll be frustrated with yourself, and I'll try to remember that when I see you not doing simple things I recommend, and it just makes things harder for you and for them, I'll try to remember that you'll be doing that because in the moment it's what will make sense to you. And you won't be just refusing my advice to spite me, because you hate me and Jesus."</p><p>"But see, there we are!" Britta threw up her hands. "You're going to be dragging Jesus into it!"</p><p>"I'm going to tell you, I drag Jesus with me wherever I go. He and I are very close. You know that." Shirley sighed. "But we're going to be trying to talk about this while somebody's screaming and clutching at our legs because somebody else won't share the Legos, or something. It's not going to be conducive to thoughtful theological discussion. You'll be exhausted and stressed, because you'll be working full-time, too… do you have a plan for child care?"</p><p>"I assume I'll have to, like, subcontract it out," Britta said. "Hire a sitter. I'm not going to ask you to do it, don't worry."</p><p>Shirley let out a bark of mirthless laughter. "You think I'll just stand idly by while some underpaid college kid plunks them down in front of <em> Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood</em>? Obviously I'm going to help."</p><p>"I'm not going to ask you to do that," Britta said. "I'm going to secretly really hope that you do, but I'm not going to ask you."</p><p>"My schedule's going to be more flexible than yours is going to be, I'll want to arrange things so one of us will be with them."</p><p>"Shirley…" Britta was tearing up.</p><p>"Those kids--our kids deserve it!" cried Shirley, brokenly. "And you don't think I see you? Trying your best, trying so hard, I know, girl! And there's so much you can't learn any way but through making your own mistakes. And I can't make mistakes for you, Lord knows, all I can do is try to help however you'll let me…"</p><p>Shirley trailed off, sniffling, as Britta tearfully embraced her.</p><p>Frankie, standing awkwardly with them, cleared her throat after a few seconds. "Okay. Well. I'm glad we had this talk." Feeling the need to add more, she cleared her throat again. "Rest assured, Britta, that while I am perhaps the least maternal person I know, I too will do my best to—"</p><p>Shirley and Britta wordlessly extended their arms in unison and pulled Frankie into the hug. "I love you, Frankie," Britta said. "I love you, Shirley."</p><p>"I love you too, Britta," Shirley said. "And I love you, too, Frankie."</p><p>Frankie, enmeshed in the hug, chuckled nervously. "I--I love you, Britta," she said carefully. "Shirley, no offense, I don't feel like we're there yet. I know Britta thinks the world of you but I haven't known you very long."</p><p>"No offense taken," Shirley assured her. "No offense taken. You and you and me and Jesus, we're going to get through this. We're going to help those kids."</p><p>"We are," Britta whispered. "We are!"</p><p>"You and you and me and Jesus," Shirley said again.</p><p>"I'm not sure—" Frankie began. </p><p>Britta shushed her. </p><p>"It's okay, Frankie," Shirley whispered.</p><p>"I'm just not sure <em> why </em> I'm part of this," Frankie said quietly.</p><p>Britta shushed her again and held her a little more tightly. </p><p>Frankie made no effort to slip out of her embrace.</p><hr/><p>Mark's plan for making optimal use of Jeff's talents surprised him. He'd assumed Mark would want him doing some of the scutwork of lawsuits: document review, overseeing filings with the court, drafting letters and contracts that were just edited-together boilerplate paragraphs out of a library of templates. Or, failing that, something involving getting out of a prenup in a nasty divorce. The way Mark had described the case, Jeff had thought it was a nasty divorce for a while. Breach of contract between members of a limited partnership (made up of a dentist and a dermatologist who shared office/clinic space and reception staff) was like a nasty divorce, in a way.</p><p>"We used to do the thing where I made you look cool, remember?" Mark said, when the time came to hammer out strategy. "You were the suave attorney with the silver tongue who could get the witness to recant on cross, or sweet-talk a jury into ignoring the evidence and trusting the sound of your voice, instead."</p><p>"I remember," Jeff said, guardedly. "Where are you going with this?"</p><p>"Well, conversely, I always looked extra-nerdy, next to you. I was a super-dweeb. The expert or whoever would scan the room, see me, assume that I was a typical specimen of manhood for the time and place, and then, whoa! It's some kind of superhero, standing next to him!"</p><p>"I remember," Jeff repeated.</p><p>"I can believe it," said the client. The client was the dentist, who claimed the dermatologist had been defrauding him. The dermatologist had convinced him to hire a fancy money guy to manage their accounts, and somehow this had resulted in substantially less money for the dentist, not more. "I can believe it," he said again. "I mean, look at this guy! You what, lift weights?"</p><p>Jeff nodded and smiled politely.</p><p>Mark cleared his throat, ready to move on. "So what I want to do for this deposition is, we come in together. I'm the lead, Jeff is my assistant. I'm nervous and awkward. I could drop some papers and get flustered. Meanwhile, Jeff, you're making small talk, you're flirting with the court reporter. Maybe you're rolling your eyes when I talk and you think I can't see."</p><p>Jeff was nonplussed, and not pleased. "You want me to undermine you?" There was always the chance he'd do that anyway.</p><p>Mark nodded. "A few minutes of that, Gonzales will think I'm an idiot. He'll get cocky. He'll be barely listening to the questions I'm asking and just reciting whatever his lawyers prepped him to say. And that's when I move in for the kill."</p><p>Understanding dawned, and Jeff smiled. "The discrepancy between the October report and the November letter."</p><p>"I'll start off with the October report. Like I don't even know there <em> is </em> a November letter." Mark's grin was almost manic. "Then we get Gonazales distracted with contempt for what a nerd I am, and that's when I turn the questions to the November letter. Any luck, he'll assume I'm still asking about the October report, he'll say something incriminating."</p><p>Jeff hemmed. "I don't know, boss."</p><p>"I like it!" cried the client. He clapped his hands excitedly. "George thinks I'm an idiot, well, we'll turn the tables on him! Can I be there to see it?"</p><p>"We don't recommend that," Jeff and Mark said in unison.</p><p>"Jinx!" cried Mark. "You owe me a Coke!"</p><p>Jeff's phone buzzed, startling all three men. Normally Jeff would have ignored it. Bad enough his phone buzzed during a client meeting, worse to stop the meeting long enough to check it. But there was a call he was expecting, sometime today or tomorrow.</p><p>He tried to check his phone quickly, but the client got an eyeful. "Oh, she's cute," he said. The profile picture for her on his phone was from the Christmas party three years ago: her holding a kitten that no doubt resented being the second-most adorable thing in the shot.</p><p>Jeff looked nervously at Mark. "I need to take this." Stepping out of a client meeting to take a personal phone call was probably a fireable offense at most firms. </p><p>The client looked askance, perhaps because he was paying for Jeff's time.</p><p>"Jeff's just recently gotten back in touch with his estranged daughter," Mark volunteered, before Jeff could say anything. "She's a freshman at Georgetown."</p><p>"Oh?" The client perked up. "My brother went to Georgetown."</p><p>Mark let out a happy gasp. "Your brother is Carl Reiner? Oh, wait, no, probably not. More likely he's someone else, who also went to Georgetown…"</p><p>That was all of Mark's covering-for-him that Jeff heard before he was out of earshot. As soon as he was in the hall he answered, though as always he felt a fleeting urge to just stare at the picture. "What's the good word?"</p><p>"I didn't get it." Annie sounded less crushed than she might have. "Just found out. It's okay," she said, before Jeff could go on a rant about what idiots they were for rejecting her. "I wasn't expecting to. I only applied this cycle because, I don't know, I felt lucky? I made the short list, though."</p><p>"They had a short list?" Jeff wouldn't have guessed that whatever entry-level DOJ forensic science position Annie had applied for would have been so competitive as to involve multiple lists.</p><p>"A short list and a second interview last week. I didn't tell you about it last time we talked because I didn't want you to assume I'd gotten it and then been disappointed." </p><p>"It's not your fault that some idiot made the mistake of failing to snatch you up immediately--" Jeff broke off, realizing what he'd just said.</p><p>Annie didn't seem to notice. "It's okay. Actually, I'm glad I did apply, because they asked me to apply again in July."</p><p>"July? I thought the next window was October."</p><p>"So did I! But there's going to be something in July. They haven't announced it officially. I don't know what all the weird bureaucratic hoops are."</p><p>"Being asked to apply sounds like a good thing," Jeff said. "Condolences on not getting out of Pointless Paperwork today, but congratulations on your next window to leave Pointless Paperwork being three months earlier than you had expected."</p><p>"Thanks," Annie said. He heard a slight catch in her throat, and waited. "And Jeff, thanks for believing in me. I really appreciate it."</p><p>"There are three kinds of people in the world," Jeff said. "People who believe in Annie Edison, people who haven't met Annie Edison, and idiots."</p><p>"Aw…" In Jeff's mind's eye he could see the soft smile that went with that <em> aw </em>. "Um, well, it's the middle of the day, you're probably doing something. I should let you go."</p><p>"Yeah, technically. But thanks for keeping me in the loop."</p><p>"Call me when you're up on Sunday, okay? Bye!"</p><p>As soon as the call was ended he ducked back into the conference room. Mark and the client were chatting amiably about Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks and <em> The 2000 Year Old Man </em> and God only knew what else. Jeff flashed Mark a quick thumbs up and he nodded in acknowledgement.</p><p>"Right, now, as I was saying--"</p><p>The client interrupted Mark. "Is Jenny okay, Jeff?"</p><p>"Yeah. Yeah, thanks for asking. She's fine. It's not a big deal."</p><p>"Mark told me about her pregnancy scare," the client continued. "That's a tough row to hoe, especially after what happened with you and her mother--"</p><p>Jeff bared his teeth in an approximation of a smile. "Yeah. Thanks." The problem with Mark was that if you didn't tell him anything he would just make stuff up that sounded good. It wasn't a bad trait in a lawyer, necessarily, but at times…</p><p> </p><p>NEXT: ANNIE VISITS!</p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Five little monkeys jumping on the bed!<br/>One fell off and hit their head!<br/>Momma called the doctor and the doctor said,<br/>"No more monkeys jumping on the bed!"</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0009"><h2>9. Then Your Face Should Surely Show It</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Baggage claim was as crowded as Troy had ever seen it. Was Passover a major travel holiday? Crowds of travelers huddled around carousels, waiting for their bags. None gave him, a scruffy-looking black guy in a camel hair coat, a second glance despite his being staggeringly good-looking. Business fliers rubbed elbows with tourists and whatever the third kind of air traveler was called, Troy didn't know. There were a bunch of nuns for some reason; they seemed unlikely to be traveling for business, but they also seemed unlikely to be traveling for pleasure, so who knew?</p><p>He spotted a ponytail bobbing on a familiar head, white earbud cables snaking down to a bag over her shoulder. Annie was intent on the baggage carousel in front of her, watching luggage pass by. Probably, Troy reasoned, she was waiting on hers. It was possible the shoulder bag was her only suitcase and she was just killing time waiting for him by checking out other peoples' luggage, maybe considering walking off with some nun's bag, but that seemed more like a Britta move than an Annie move.</p><p>Annie was facing away from him and he couldn't easily move into her line of sight without climbing up on the carousel and the last time he'd done that he'd been kicked out of the airport along with his grandmother. He'd been seven at the time. Nana had made him pay for it. So, not wanting anyone to whup him with a switch, Troy instead reached out and clasped Annie's shoulder, giving it a quick squeeze through her coat.</p><p>She startled and turned. As soon as Annie saw Troy, the fight-or-flight vanished from her expression as quickly as it had appeared.  Laughing giddily, Annie pushed into his space and threw her arms around him. Troy could hear a tinny pop song on her earbuds, something about trying and failing and trying again.</p><p>"Troy! Oh my God! It's so good to see you!" Annie hugged him tightly as he embraced her in turn. "You look amazing!"</p><p>"Welcome back to Colorado, Annie," Troy said, grinning over her shoulder. "And yeah, I know, this coat looks great on me. Is that your only bag or are we waiting?"</p><p>Still holding him, she tilted her head back to indicate the baggage sliding along behind her. "Any minute. Two and a half years, you're a sight for sore eyes! I've missed you."</p><p>"Back at you." They'd talked on the phone a half-dozen times since his return to civilization from technically-not-Fiji, but that wasn't the same as sharing space with his friend.</p><p>Annie squeezed him tight for a moment, then withdrew from the embrace and turned back towards the carousel. "Oh! There it went!" She pointed at a large red suitcase with a big purple ribbon that had passed by while her back was turned. </p><p>Troy nodded. "It'll come back around." If there hadn't been fifty-something other people crowded around the carousel he would have chased after it. "It's a big one," he observed, because it was going to be a little bit before the coming-back-around happened.</p><p>Annie was smiling broadly. "Yeah, I brought my big suitcase so I can take stuff back with me. I can't wait to see everybody."</p><p>"We all missed you," Troy said. "It'll be good to show you the house. You can tell me what you think about the pool. Britta had them paint your room."</p><p>"She sent me pictures, yeah." Annie looked askance a moment. "It's a nice gesture."</p><p>"I know," Troy said. "I know. You're like, I'm not going to be here enough for it to be a thing, you guys should just go ahead and make that room a podcast studio, or whatever. But we got the space--the podcast studio is out in the pool house. Less noise, less chance of Ben running in."</p><p>Annie looked nonplussed, and for a moment Troy was concerned he'd misunderstood her. "You guys are doing a podcast?"</p><p>"Oh, yeah. Didn't you know? It's a behind-the-scenes thing for <em> Troy and Abed Making Content</em>. We call it <em> Troy and Abed Do Podcasting</em>. It's a whole branding thing. I wanted to call it <em>Troy and Abed in the Morning: the Podcast</em> but Abed thought we should keep the name pattern."</p><p>"Okay," Annie said, in the tone of a person who hadn't quite understood why they'd just been told the thing they were told, but didn't want to say so. She hefted her shoulder bag. "So, where did you park?"</p><p>"Abed has the car. You wanna call him, tell him we'll be over where he dropped me off in a couple of minutes?"</p><p>"Sure!" </p><p>While Annie fiddled with her phone Troy spotted her big red suitcase coming back around on the carousel. He snatched it up easily in one hand; it was mostly empty. "I get what you said about taking stuff back with you," he commented.</p><p>"Hm?" Annie glanced up from her phone. "Oh, thanks. Yeah, I mean, when I packed the first time it was just going to be a short-ish trip and there's a lot I want to hold on to. Mementos, my winter wardrobe...although now it's getting warmer again, so whatever."</p><p>"You can keep as much as you want at Hawthorne House," Troy reminded her as he led Annie towards the car. "We've got a huge basement. Right now Jordan and Elijah and Ben treat it like a big playroom."</p><p>"Wow, sounds like you guys are all...moved in." </p><p>"Pretty much. Speaking of the house, I got some paperwork for you to sign while you're here. I mean, I don't have it on me, it's back at the house. Don't let me forget, okay?"</p><p>Annie made a noise like she made when she had bad news she didn't want to deliver (a noise Troy knew well, even after two and a half years). "Okay."</p><p>"I know, I know, you're an East Coaster now," Troy said as they left baggage claim. "All slim and coffee-drinking and you act like escalators are stairs…"</p><p>"Escalators <em> are </em> stairs!" Annie snapped. "It's not a ride, people!" </p><p>"I mean, it kind of is," Troy said. He pulled Annie's big suitcase behind him. "You ride it."</p><p>"<em>You </em> ride it." Annie shook her head and sighed. "Sorry, sorry, it's just, ten minutes ago there was a really long escalator I had to go down to get to baggage claim and it was extra slow for some reason and all these people were just standing on it and I couldn't get past them and we were all going down, it's not like I was asking anybody to climb stairs."</p><p>Troy smiled. Same old Annie. "See? East Coast person. All edgy. Sharp corners. Like Frankie."</p><p>"Frankie?" Annie repeated, surprised.</p><p>"Britta's friend," Troy explained. "I thought you knew her?"</p><p>"Yeah. Huh. I didn't realize you knew Frankie. But I guess… I don't know why you wouldn't. Wait, 'Britta's friend,' that's how you think of her?"</p><p>"Sure, why not?" Troy asked as they reached the passenger pickup curb. Abed wasn't there yet.</p><p>"I…" Annie stood there at the curb, hands on her shoulder bag, staring quizzically into space for a second or two. "Okay."</p><p>"Everything changes," Troy said philosophically. "You left, I got here, Abed and Shirley came back, Jeff…" He trailed off as Abed pulled up. "Speaking of Abed, there he is."</p><p>"Wait, Jeff?" Annie turned to him, eyes widened in alarm. "I thought you came with Abed, he—"</p><p>Troy was nonplussed by Annie's strong reaction. "Yeah, dummy, Abed, I said. Just now."</p><p>"Oh, um." Annie blinked, like she'd confused herself. "Right. Well, what about Jeff? Is he okay? He didn't say anything."</p><p>"He's fine! I guess?" Troy wondered for a moment if something had happened to Jeff in the last couple of days and he'd somehow not heard about it. "He's doing law stuff again, on the side, is all."</p><p>"He didn't offer to come get me." Annie peered in the direction of oncoming traffic, as though she were concerned Jeff might suddenly pull up. "I mean, I didn't ask him to. He would have if I'd asked. If he'd offered I would have said yes. We're friends."</p><p>"Right."</p><p>They watched Abed park, a maneuver which took a surprising amount of time. Troy cleared his throat and wondered how things had suddenly become awkward for no reason. "Listen, let me get this over with. I know you're not interested in living at Hawthorne House.  But think of it as an inheritance from Pierce. If you really want I'll buy out your share, but you can hang on to it. You don't have to do anything, it'll just sit here for you, like that tiara. Which is also in your room. In case you ever decide you want it."</p><p>"Oh, sure," Annie said distractedly. "I'll take it, I guess. And you don't need to buy me out, it's fine."</p><p>"Cool," Troy said as he popped the trunk to stow Annie's suitcase. That was a good thing, he decided, Annie not feeling like she needed to sell to make herself stay in DC. It meant she was doing better than she'd been.</p><hr/><p>Annie climbed into the front of the car and hugged Abed hello, which was a little tricky as Abed was still buckled into the driver's seat. Troy sat in the back, mostly listening as Annie told him and Abed about her trip and her new apartment in DC (just outside DC, actually, someplace called Nova that Troy guessed was actually in Maryland). She told them about her Nova roommates, and how her Nova roommates weren't nearly as fun or sociable as Troy and Abed had been. She had just started telling them about her job and how she was trying to transfer to a different department, when they pulled up at Hawthorne House.</p><p>She didn't stay long, though. Once she'd changed and dropped off her bags and hugged Britta and Shirley and Jordan and Elijah and Ben (the latter three significantly less excited about her arrival than the former two), Abed drove Annie to her grandmother's house for Passover Seder. Knowing how strained Annie's relationship with her family was, everybody offered to come with, either all of them at once, or just one of them or some subset, but Annie declined, saying that if she didn't show up unaccompanied it would cause new problems and she'd rather just power through the old, familiar ones.</p><p>At the agreed-on time Britta pulled up in front of Annie's Bubbe's house. It was a nice one, not far from where Britta's parents lived, or had lived the last time Britta spoke to them. There was a big porch, with a swing, lit up by light from the bay windows. Britta spotted Annie sitting in the swing, talking to a woman sitting in a big wicker chair. Or, no, it was Annie in the chair. Britta rolled down her car window and squinted, trying to figure it out from thirty yards away in bad light. Two women, same size, same build, both with long dark hair and heavy jackets that weren't quite winter coats. The woman in the swing was older, Britta suddenly saw, maybe about Britta's mother's age, maybe younger. Annie waved to her, and made a "one minute" gesture.  Annie's mother-or-whoever gestured, too, and Britta realized the older woman was in the middle of telling Annie some story, judging by their body language.</p><p>"Take your time! No rush!" Britta shouted. Then, worried she might have sounded too sarcastic, she grinned as widely as she could and gave them a double thumbs-up out the car window.</p><p>Annie's mother said something Annie thought was funny. Britta's eyes narrowed and her smile grew fixed. She couldn't hear them but she was sure that Annie's mother had just made fun of her. It had been a dorky gesture she'd just made. Now Britta felt that the time when she could have gotten out of the car and gone up to the porch and formally been introduced to Annie's mother had passed. She was stuck sitting there.</p><p>It was only a minute or two, though. Soon enough Annie was opening the passenger side door.</p><p>"Would you like to meet Bubbe?" Annie asked her without preamble. "Bubbe wants to say hi."</p><p>Britta was nonplussed. "Oh, sure. That's your grandmother?" she asked as she undid her safety belt and climbed out of her car.</p><p>"Yeah." Annie glanced back at her, nodded. "She thinks it's weird for you to sit out here without saying hi, like you've been sent by the white slavers to collect me."</p><p>"The white slavers?" Britta repeated dubiously.</p><p>Annie winced. "Bubbe thinks there are--she calls them the white slavers. The white slavers want to steal me away. Me and you and everybody. Well, everybody who's white. And a woman."</p><p>"Do we need to warn Frankie?" Britta asked. "'No, no," she said immediately. "Of course not. Your bubbe is weird and old and probably kind of racist. No offense."</p><p>"None taken," Annie assured her.</p><p>Annie's bubbe turned out to be a charming woman who definitely could have passed for Annie's mother. Or so Britta told herself. Seeing that Annie's grandmother and Britta's mother were contemporaries made Britta feel old. Annie's actual mother had left about twenty minutes after Annie's arrival, after what Bubbe called the world's fastest Seder. Annie didn't seem at all upset by how perfunctory their interaction had been, but she was less sanguine about her brother. Anthony came with their mother and left with their mother, despite Annie's invitation to come back with her to Hawthorne House and see the mansion that Annie probably owned one-sixth of. Troy said she did, but Annie wanted verification from somebody who had never drunkenly claimed <em> Attack of the Clones </em> was the best <em> Star Wars </em> movie.</p><p>"So we all figured you'd be exhausted by this point," Britta said, once she had Annie in the car and they were headed back to Hawthorne House. "Otherwise everybody would be at the house tonight."</p><p>"Everybody?" Annie repeated. She yawned.</p><p>"Frankie and Craig and Jeff and everybody. Elroy, Ian... Chang, I guess. They'll all be around tomorrow, though. Troy wanted to do a big thing with barbeque ribs from, like, Ed's? We're doing pizza instead, though. More vegetarian-friendly. There's so many hoops you have to jump through to become a foster mother. It's insane."</p><p>The abrupt transition confused Annie. "What?"</p><p>"I have to take this, like, parenting class. And there was this huge application form. And next month there's a home visit where some social worker is going to come out to the house and look at it and make sure I'm not pulling some scam where I'm going to—" Britta laughed. "Where I'm going to sell the kids to the white slavers. Wow, that is such a racist term."</p><p>"I never really thought about it. Yeah. Maybe Bubbe is making a joke." Annie yawned again. "A weird joke that she's been working on since I was little."</p><p>"Anyway. I'm working on it. I don't know how I'm going to convince them the guys are normal."</p><p>"I'm sure Troy and Abed will be on their best behavior," Annie declared. "And Jeff, if he's there."</p><p>"He'd better be." Britta glanced at Annie. "Otherwise I'll tell you about it, and then he'll really be sorry."</p><p>Annie gave a little half-laugh. "I don't know what Jeff's told you. We've barely talked since I left. More recently," she allowed. "But there was nothing, for a long time. I don't even know how he's doing, really. You know better, I guess. You see him."</p><p>"Sure." Britta glanced at Annie again, this time with apprehension. "I mean, I'm not seeing him."</p><p>"I know," Annie said. "I know."</p><p>They sat in silence for a little while. Annie yawned again, which made Britta yawn.</p><p>"Can I ask you something?" Annie was looking down at her phone in her hands.</p><p>"Huh? Sure."</p><p>"How is Jeff doing? Is he seeing anybody? Is he okay? Is he…" Annie steeled herself. "Is he still picking up women in bars for one-night stands? He quit doing that for a while and if he started again after he graduated he quit it again when he went back to Greendale to teach, but I don't know what's he's been doing since I quit--" Annie had been speaking faster and faster, and stopped abruptly. "You know."</p><p>"Um," Britta said.</p><p>"I can't just ask him," Annie said. "He'd tell me whatever he thought I wanted to hear. Or, I don't know, maybe he wouldn't. It would be super awkward, anyway."</p><p>"Yeah," Britta said. "Awkward."</p><p>"And you know, I've tried to get Troy, and Frankie, and Abed to tell me stuff, but either they're just too circumspect or they don't know anything or they're really bad at social cues and misunderstand what I'm asking so persistently that I have to think Abed is just pretending not to understand so he doesn't have to tell me anything."</p><p>"Okay." Britta locked her gaze on the road ahead.</p><p>"So." Annie turned to Britta. "Is Jeff still picking up women in bars for one-night stands?"</p><p>"I don't…think so?" Britta tried to think of a way to change the subject but she felt trapped. "He mostly sleeps at the house when he doesn't have to go to Greendale the next day. I mean, not all the time. A couple of times a week. He might be there when we get there. He wasn't when I left."</p><p>Annie made a noise that conveyed layers of discomfort. "Yeah."</p><p>"I don't think he's dating anybody," Britta continued as she kept her eyes pointed resolutely forward. "He can be really quiet about that kind of thing. I think. But I don't think he's been seeing anyone since…" She trailed off because she wasn't sure how to end the sentence.</p><p>"Yeah," Annie said again. She turned away and stared out the passenger window. "I used to know everything he was doing. Then he ran away to be a lawyer again and wouldn't answer my calls. Then we came back to Greendale and it seemed like...like I knew what he was doing, again. But I don't know. People change. People grow apart."</p><p>She didn't sound very convinced of that, Britta thought. She managed not to vocalize this opinion, though.</p><p>"And now, you know, he's here, I'm there, the window is closed and we're just friends. I'm just interested in Jeff, in what Jeff is doing these days, I'm just interested as his friend."</p><p>"We're all friends," Britta said, because it seemed safe to do so. "Some of us more than others. Abed and Shirley aren't very close. Never were. Troy and Abed are close. Shirley and Frankie? They're getting there."</p><p>"Yeah," Annie said. She shifted in her seat. "I don't want to put you on the spot. I just don't know as much about Jeff's day-to-day as I did when I was managing his office hours calendar for him."</p><p>Britta considered trying to assure Annie that Jeff was in better shape these days, that he wasn't drinking while teaching any more, that he was enjoying working with Mark again. It seemed like anything she said would lead to further questions, though, and Annie was clearly tired. So instead Britta just nodded and said she was glad Annie was back, even if only for a weekend.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0010"><h2>10. Can You Tie Them in a Knot?</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Thanks to bethany, amrywiol, raj for beta reading. I should remember to thank them more often. They're great. Anything bad, assume I included it over their objections.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Frankie had intended to arrive at Hawthorne House at a reasonable early-afternoon hour, but her morning appointment was cancelled and she'd already done the weekend's work of vacuuming and laundry the night before and anyway it was just before lunchtime. The sun shone brightly as she pulled into the mansion's large driveway, practically a small parking lot. She recognized Troy's electric rich-man's-toy car, Britta's well-used sedan Frankie had helped her pick out, and Shirley's SUV, as well as Jeff's worn Lexus, which he was just parking as Frankie pulled in.</p><p>Annie, the reason for Frankie's visit, came out of the house as she was getting out of her car. "Hi, Jeff! I mean, guys!" The younger woman sounded thrilled to see him. Them. "Frankie, hi!"</p><p>"Annie, hi," Frankie said warmly. She and Annie shared a somewhat awkward hug; awkward because Jeff had nearly stepped between them to hug Annie himself, then suddenly moved back behind Frankie. Annie did a sort of double-fake and seemed slightly disappointed to be hugging Frankie, which Frankie tried not to take personally. Annie had known Jeff much longer, after all.</p><p>"Hey, you," Frankie heard Jeff say behind her.</p><p>"Hey," Annie purred into Frankie's ear. Well, shoulder. Frankie had six inches on Annie. Annie gripped Frankie tightly, holding the hug longer than Frankie had expected. "I'm glad you could make it."</p><p>"Wouldn't miss it," Jeff said. Frankie would have responded as well, under the assumption that she was included in Annie's 'you' but she didn't get a chance, because Annie wanted to know how Jeff's meeting with someone named Mortinson had gone, and Jeff started to talk about it in a way that assumed a lot of contextual knowledge Frankie didn't have.</p><p>Frankie would have just discreetly detached herself and moved towards someone whose stories Frankie had all the context for, like Britta, who was presumably inside somewhere, but Annie was still clutching her tightly. Frankie shifted her weight from one foot to the other, a nonverbal cue that Annie should have understood to mean that Frankie was ready to end their hug, but Annie's only response was to shift her own weight slightly so as to keep Frankie more completely between Annie and Jeff.</p><p>She waited a few more seconds. Frankie was nothing if not patient, at least with people she liked, a list that included Annie near its top. But when Annie had asked Jeff a second follow-up question about someone named Mark who was, apparently, present at this Jeff-Mortinson meeting, she decided enough was enough and disentangled herself from Annie, wriggling out of her hug. "I should head in," she began.</p><p>Annie did a double take, like she'd forgotten the woman she'd been hugging for an increasingly inappropriate amount of time. "Oh! Frankie! Hi! Yes!" She spun around and headed back towards the house herself, almost skipping. "Sorry. I wanted to ask, how is Greendale doing without me?"</p><p>"Rapidly backsliding," Jeff said. He trailed behind them, not seeming to mind his story having been interrupted in the slightest.</p><p>"I don't believe that," Annie assured Frankie. She shot Jeff a look Frankie struggled to interpret, and he chuckled.</p><p>Once inside there was a round of greetings from Troy, Britta, Abed, and Shirley, who were all collected in Hawthorne House's central greatroom. One of Shirley's sons, the youngest, had been watching something animated with Britta, but he quietly withdrew to elsewhere in the mansion as soon as it became apparent the adults were going to start conversing. Britta and Jeff and Frankie and Annie ended up in one clump while Troy and Abed and Shirley were at the other end of the room, just far enough away to make for two discrete conversations.</p><p>A few seconds after Annie hesitantly sat down next to Jeff on one of the big sofas, he sprang up, saying something about needing a drink, and hurried over to the liquor cabinet.</p><p>"Oh." Annie made a little hum of disappointment.</p><p>"He doesn't drink as much as he used to," Britta assured Annie as she sat down next to her in the seat Jeff had vacated, across from Frankie. "He's actually doing a lot better."</p><p>"I know," Annie said, frowning slightly. "Well. I wanted to ask about your coursework—"</p><p>"Boring!" Britta cried. "Tell us about DC! Did you see the cherry blossoms? Did you go to the protest I told you about?"</p><p>"Yes," Annie said. "And no. It's been really busy…"</p><p>"How many times have you seen your dumb bunny movie?" Britta countered.</p><p>"The whole point is that she's not a dumb bunny," Jeff declared as he re-entered the conversational grouping and sat down in the chair furthest from Annie. He was holding a scotch in one hand and a glass of something clear in the other. "Clearly you haven't seen it."</p><p>"I saw it!" Britta said quickly, her eyes widening. "I saw it with Frankie!" Britta turned to Frankie, very obviously silently pleading. <em> I told Annie I saw it, help! </em></p><p>Frankie weighed her options. "Yes, we saw it together," she lied. "I remember, you still owe me for your ticket and the popcorn and chocolate-covered almonds and of course the dinner before—"</p><p>"What? No, no, no." Britta swallowed. "I reimbursed you for that when I... got you that very nice card. You remember. It had a cat in a tuxedo on it."</p><p>Frankie murmured appreciatively. "Oh, of course." She winked, so Britta would know she was off the hook, and Britta visibly relaxed.</p><p>"Here," Jeff said, leaning over and proffering the tumbler of clear liquid on ice to Annie. "And to answer the question you were about to ask, yes, they are like this pretty much all the time," Jeff said to Annie.</p><p>"Well, it's nice that they've become closer friends," Annie replied as Frankie and Britta exchanged matching <em> I don't know what that's supposed to mean </em> glances. She accepted the tumbler and eyed it cautiously.</p><p>"Appletini," Jeff said with a grin.</p><p>Annie turned pink. "Jeff!" She sounded scandalized, for some reason, but also flattered.</p><p>"Actually it's water," Jeff admitted. "I figured, you probably haven't even had lunch yet..."</p><p>"You figured right." Annie looked, nevertheless, very pleased.</p><hr/><p>Several hours later, Frankie had migrated to a different seat and Britta, Jeff, and Annie had been replaced by some latecomers to the informal event. Ian Duncan was relating some implausible story about his romantic exploits among his fellow faculty at Greendale. If he'd been more prudent he might have thought twice about telling it in front of his boss (and Craig, who was still technically their boss). But then, if he made better choices he probably wouldn't have ended up at Greendale.</p><p>"And that's why I broke it off," Duncan concluded.</p><p>Craig Pelton hummed. "I heard that she dumped you for Albert from the typewriter- repair department and you were so distraught you broke down sobbing in the middle of a lecture, and then you canceled the Psych 305 midterm because grading papers would rouse too many painful memories."</p><p>"I was going to say," Frankie murmured.</p><p>"Yeah, well, that’s the story going around," Duncan conceded, "but only so she can maintain some dignity among the faculty. I figured, she deserves that much."</p><p>Despite her best effort, Frankie realized, she’d ended up in a chair that faced the Pierce Hawthorne portrait. He leered down at her. No matter how many times she saw the painting, Frankie couldn’t shake the sense that Pierce’s eyes were following her chest.</p><p>Nearby Troy and Abed watched a television in the corner as it played an episode of something British and low-budget. Supposedly it was something they’d watched with Annie, though she wasn’t there with them. Shirley, over in the open kitchen, was at least half-watching the show, too, while she finalized a casserole that was going into the oven. Ben Chang and Elroy were playing some kind of dominoes. Shirley's kids were elsewhere in the mansion, and there was no sign of Britta or Annie or Jeff.</p><p>Just as she was about to rise and refill her wineglass and go looking for people she liked more than Ian Duncan, maybe just bother Shirley while the latter was trying to bake, Frankie’s phone buzzed.</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>FROM: Britta Perry (GCC guidance counselor; work friend)</b>
</p><p>
  <b>Plz rescue me</b>
</p><p>
  <b>Outside by fire pit</b>
</p><p>
  <b>They wont let me leave them alone 2gether</b>
</p><p> </p><p>"Well, Ian, that anecdote is as captivating as it is actionable," Frankie announced, rising. "But alas, you’ll have to excuse me."</p><p>Craig blinked owlishly at her and might have said something had Duncan not taken the opportunity to launch into an implausible narrative set many years ago involving himself, then-attorney Jeff Winger, and an expensive sports bicycle that had rolled into Duncan’s stopped car at such speed that it became mangled, exactly as if Duncan had drunkenly run it over, which he might have suffered consequences for had Jeff not been in the passenger seat, ready to explain the truth of the situation to the cop that eventually appeared to write it up. Frankie, like Craig, had heard the story before and knew it ended with Duncan wistfully admiring Jeff’s ability not only to talk the cop into writing the accident up favorably, but to convince the pulchritudinous cyclist (whose voluptuousness increased every time Duncan told the story) to accept his version of events and leave the scene in his company. So Frankie didn’t feel she was missing anything by ducking out.</p><p>"Frankie!" Britta called as soon as she stepped out onto the wide patio behind the house. She was sitting with Jeff and Annie on some padded outdoor chairs that ringed a heavy copper fire pot. None of them were dressed warmly enough for the cooling evening air. But no, Annie was wearing a jacket. Jeff’s jacket. "Frankie! Join us!"</p><p>"Aren’t you cold?" Frankie asked as she cautiously approached the trio.</p><p>"We were just about to start a fire," Jeff said.</p><p>"I could get a blanket," Annie said at almost the same time. "You said there were some in the pool house. I’ll be right back. Don’t go anywhere," she instructed Jeff, and then gestured towards Frankie and Britta as if to indicate that she’d been speaking to all of them, not just Jeff.</p><p>Jeff didn’t say anything, as Annie dashed off. Instead he focused his attention on the half-set fire in front of him. "There’s a gas starter," he said to nobody as he slid from his seat to squat before the fire pot. "It’s pretty cool."</p><p>"I have to pee," Britta said, rising to her feet.</p><p>Jeff looked up, momentarily stricken. He recovered quickly. "Sure, sure. Frankie! Frankie, sit down, sit down."</p><p>"I was…" Frankie trailed off because she’d been about to say she needed to go with Britta, but that didn’t work under the circumstances. </p><p>As Britta headed back inside, once she was behind Jeff and out of his field of vision, she mouthed <em> thank you </em> to Frankie and pantomimed shooting herself in the head, for some reason.</p><p>"Join us, Frankie!" Jeff made it sound less like an invitation and more like a desperate command.</p><p>"I was...cold," Frankie said slowly.</p><p>"Hence the fire." Jeff nodded quickly and pressed a button. There was a popping sound and then the fire pot was full of fire, tongues of natural-gas-fueled flame licking the heap of wood. He sat back on his heels, looking very pleased with himself. "See?"</p><p>There was a surprising amount of heat coming off the fire pot in short order. Frankie slowly sat down in the chair next to the one Britta had left. </p><p>"What’s new?" Jeff asked her as he sat down one spot over in the ring of seats around the fire pot, on something that was either a very wide chair or a small loveseat. "Haven’t seen you since, what, like an hour ago?"</p><p>"That sounds right." Frankie wondered if Britta was coming back. "I hear your extracurricular consulting is going well."</p><p>"It is, yeah. Who knows? If it goes well enough, maybe I can start working for Mark full time. Finally quit Greendale."</p><p>"Leaving Greendale and moving into a satisfying career beyond the school. It’s a dream we attempt to encourage in our students but I admit our success rate is less than stellar. Still, every so often someone manages it…"</p><p>On cue, Annie returned, carrying a huge padded quilt that seemed as big she was. "I could only find the one," she was saying, "but if Frankie and I share it on the little couch, I can give you your jacket back…"</p><p>Jeff had leaped to his feet as soon as Annie appeared. "Oh, sure."</p><p>"Or I could just stay here," Frankie suggested. Her chair was closest to the fire pot and she didn’t want to give up the freedom to stand up without disturbing anyone else’s blanket positioning. Frankie was not a natural snuggler.</p><p>"Take the blanket and the couch, here." Jeff was stepping away from where he’d been sitting a moment before, gesturing towards Annie. "I’m fine."</p><p>"Oh, don’t be silly, I—here." Annie stepped close to Jeff and pressed the blanket into his personal space, drawing away as he reluctantly picked it up. "I have your jacket, I’m fine."</p><p>Jeff was nodding and Frankie knew she should have kept quiet but she couldn’t resist sticking her oar in. "Or Annie could take the blanket and Jeff could get his jacket back."</p><p>Both of them looked briefly stricken. </p><p>"I’m fine," Jeff said again.</p><p>Annie looked at Jeff, at the blanket in his arms, down to his jacket on her, over to the fire pot, back to Jeff, like she was trying to do some kind of complex arithmetic in her head. "No, no, it’s okay," she said, scowling. It was unclear what she was referring to.</p><p>Jeff made a noise like an irritated snarl. "Dammit, Annie, you're being--just sit down!" He gestured at the loveseat he’d just vacated.</p><p>Annie came to some kind of a decision, and sat primly down, leaving the large blanket, still folded, in her lap.</p><p>They were treating this like the stakes were much higher than they were, or so it seemed to Frankie.</p><p>"There, you see?" Jeff probably would have said more, but as he tried to step back away Annie growled something, grabbed his arm and pulled him down onto the couch next to her.</p><p>Then they were both laughing, slightly anxiously.</p><p>"Okay. Okay?" Annie said to Jeff as she spread the blanket out over both of them. "Frankie!" she cried, as though noticing her for the first time. "It’s so good to see you!"</p><p>"You, too." Frankie watched as Jeff and Annie scooted around under the blanket. From her outsider’s perspective it looked like each of them was trying to get as close to the other as possible without intruding on their personal space. There were a lot of small adjustments and they were grinning like they knew they were being ridiculous. "How’s DC?" she asked, as if they weren’t doing whatever they were doing.</p><p>"Oh, it’s great. Well, it’s okay." Annie was looking intently at her now, like she'd made up her mind that she was <em> talking to Frankie </em>. "It’s a change, you know? I was used to being the big fish in the small pond…"</p><p>"Pond seems overly generous," Jeff interjected. "Cesspool?"</p><p>Without looking his way Annie gave Jeff a light smack on the arm. Her nervous smile widened slightly. "Stop it," she said, eyes still on Frankie.</p><p>"We could split the difference and say septic tank. Something modern and hygienic."</p><p>Annie bit her lip and grinned at Frankie. She started to turn towards Jeff, then stopped herself. "My roommates are way less fun than Troy and Abed were. I’ve tried to get them to do movie nights but Yvonne doesn’t like anything that’s not Pixar and Jessica claims she only watches hardcore pornography, so…" She shrugged.</p><p>"There are a lot of different <em> kinds </em> of hardcore pornography available, more than ever with the internet piping it into our homes 24/7, pop-up ads and live streaming and so on, but I suppose very little of that would satisfy this Yvonne," Frankie replied. "What if they were wearing Woody and Buzz costumes? No, even then, one would be dealing with unlicensed third-party knockoff material..."</p><p>Annie nodded, as though all this were obvious. "Anyway I don’t think Jessica was serious. I was thinking about calling her bluff, though," she continued, turning away from Frankie to address Jeff specifically. "She comes home, I’ve got <em> something </em> on the TV in the living room, I’m like, come in, sit down, join me…"</p><p>"She’d probably get the wrong idea." Jeff was grinning again. Frankie wasn’t sure she’d ever seen him smiling quite so broadly. "I mean, I assume it would be the wrong idea."</p><p>Annie scooted slightly closer to Jeff, under the blanket. "Well, it depends. I mean, Jessica’s just crass. I'm 99% sure she just said that to get me to quit bugging her. Joke's on her, all she had to say was 'quit bugging me' and I would have, and now instead she's getting total strangers in Colorado hearing about her porn addiction."</p><p>"Well, firstly, who said ‘addiction’? Maybe she just avoids all film and television," Jeff suggested. "Secondly, I don't think saying 'quit bugging me' has gotten you to quit bugging anybody, ever."</p><p>"Oh, no?" It was hard to tell from this angle but it looked to Frankie like Annie was batting her eyelashes at Jeff. "I just don't think anybody's ever asked me to stop bugging them. Because I'm so much fun."</p><p>"I've told you to quit bugging me dozens of times."</p><p>"Really?" Annie was the picture of innocent confusion. "Are you sure? That doesn't sound like you."</p><p>If it were possible for Jeff's grin to widen further, it would have. "Maybe not in those exact words…"</p><p>Annie seemed to suddenly notice that she'd scooted much closer to Jeff than she'd been when they'd sat down. She cleared her throat awkwardly and shifted back again, while Jeff pretended not to notice.</p><p>If she was going to have to put up with this Frankie would need more alcohol. She was understanding Britta's shooting-herself-in-the-head gesture a little better. "I’m going to refill my wine glass," she announced. As she started to stand, matching panicked expressions washed quickly over Jeff and Annie’s faces, replacing their smiles, only to be replaced by much more nervous and forced smiles.</p><p>"Don’t go—" Annie plainly was trying to sound sprightly.</p><p>"Let me," Jeff said at the same time. He had more than a touch of manic energy.</p><p>Frankie didn’t cease her standing. "It’s fine. I’ll just be a moment." She motioned for them to remain seated.</p><p>Annie had that trying-to-do-complex-math-while-listening-to-country-music expression again. "Come right back?" she pleaded.</p><p>"Yes, yes, of course." Frankie hurried inside (it was downright chilly once she was away from the fire pot) and helped herself to the box of wine on the kitchen counter.</p><p>"You okay?" Shirley was still in the kitchen area. "You don’t usually, uh, do that," she added as Frankie drank half the contents of her newly-refilled glass and then topped it off again.</p><p>"I’m fine. Tell me," Frankie said as a thought struck her. "You were here when you were all undergraduates together, right?"</p><p>Shirley plainly thought this an odd question. "Yes. You sure you haven't had enough to drink?"</p><p>"Jeff and Annie," Frankie said, ignoring that. "What was their...situation, exactly? I know it was all over by the time I came to campus but did they ever…" She flailed for a good way to say <em> sleep together </em> but gave up. "I never thought—"</p><p>A slammed door behind her gave Frankie pause. Shirley was looking over her shoulder, concerned. Frankie turned around and saw a wide-eyed, red-faced Annie Edison leaning against the door to the outside. She glanced about, saw Elroy and Chang at the table and Shirley and Frankie in the kitchen, and moved to the women.</p><p>"I just kissed Jeff," she said without preamble. "It was really dumb. I didn’t mean to."</p><p>Wordlessly, Frankie handed Annie her wine glass. Annie drained it in a draught, which seemed like a good idea until she'd done it. Her face felt hot.</p><p>"Oh," she said, "that might have been a mistake. The wine. I'm just making a lot of mistakes really close together right now. Wow."</p><p>Then Shirley and Frankie were on either side of Annie, clutching her about the shoulders, cooing reassuring nonsense. If Annie had been in a better state of mind she might have taken comfort in the way the two women, despite their dramatically different backgrounds and personalities, responded identically to her display of emotion.</p><p>"I blame myself," Frankie muttered.</p><p>"Sweetie, what happened?" Shirley asked.</p><p>"We were just talking, and then Frankie left—"</p><p>"Which seemed reasonable in the moment," Frankie said quietly.</p><p>"And Jeff and I were just looking at each other, and he was smiling, and…I kissed him. I feel awful. He jumped up. I..." Annie trailed off and her hands moved to cover her lower face. "Oh, God."</p><p>"Let’s…" Frankie looked over Annie’s head towards the rest of the great room. Jeff had quietly come in while Annie was chugging Frankie's wine, and was getting led elsewhere by Troy and Abed. "Bedroom," she suggested.</p><p>Annie nodded and allowed Shirley and Frankie to lead her to one of the guest rooms and sat her down on the edge of the bed there. "I need to apologize to him," she decided. "We were doing good, you know, we were just hanging out, it was like we were friends again."</p><p>Over her head, Shirley shot Frankie and inquisitive look, and Frankie looked dubious.</p><p>"And," Annie continued, "and it’s not like I was seeing him with my eyes but we had been talking on the phone pretty regularly and, it’s just, seeing him right there and being where he is it’s just—I can’t, I shouldn’t have done it. I need to apologize."</p><p>Shirley, on her left, scoffed. "You don’t need to apologize for what that man—"</p><p>"He didn’t! I did!" Annie protested.</p><p>Frankie, on her right, made a noncommittal sound. "I suspect given the way I observed the two of you, he’s equally—"</p><p>"No, it… Jeff is good. He’s never, <em> never </em> made a move on me like that." Annie winced as a heavily edited clip reel of every time he’d rebuffed her advances played, at high speed and of its own accord, in her mind’s eye. "Not once."</p><p>She was going back to DC tomorrow. Maybe she could spend the next eighteen hours hiding in a bathroom.</p><hr/><p>"Let me start by saying, you did the right thing coming to us," Troy told Jeff. Abed nodded.</p><p>"I’m already regretting it." Jeff rubbed his temples as he leaned against the office wall.</p><p>"Not helpful, Jeff," Troy said gently.</p><p>"I mean I regret coming to you, not that I regret kissing her. I mean, I shouldn’t have kissed her. I should regret that. She has a whole life now, two time zones away, she doesn’t need—" Jeff stopped himself. "Annie’s flying back to DC, to her home, tomorrow afternoon. I’ll just leave."</p><p>"We’re going to make s’mores," Abed objected.</p><p>"And you can make them without me," Jeff said. "I’ll go home and watch <em> Scarface </em> on Netflix."</p><p>"<em>Scarface </em> isn’t on Netflix," Abed pointed out, "and based on your watch history you’re much more likely to put on <em> Erin Brockovich</em>."</p><p>"Okay, firstly, I need to change my Netflix password again, clearly. Secondly, Julia Roberts is an underappreciated actress, she’s much more than just a pretty face. And thirdly, that’s not relevant."</p><p>"I didn’t bring up Netflix," Abed muttered.</p><p>"You guys can obviously afford your own Netflix account, so why are you even—"</p><p>"Listen, buddy," Troy said, with the kind of equanimity only Troy ever seemed able to muster. "Annie’s great. She’s known you a long time. I’m sure she’s not mad."</p><p>Jeff blinked. Annie being angry at him for kissing her hadn’t even occurred to him. He’d just assumed she’d take that aspect of it in stride. Pitying, embarrassed on his behalf, sympathetic but striving to do a better job of setting boundaries, recalling how he’d hurt her before but putting that aside because she was concerned about him as a friend—</p><p>"When she got off the plane," Troy continued, "her first question pretty much was, ‘How is Jeff?’ Also, ‘Where is Jeff?’ ‘Is Jeff seeing anyone?’ ‘Is Jeff doing better?’ And I said to her, you’re...doing better." Troy seemed to have realized that his words weren’t having his desired effect.</p><p>Jeff reminded himself there was no point in beating himself up for the mistakes of the past, like when he’d… no. No point in rehashing it. "It’s okay," he said. "It’ll be okay. We’ll just pretend it didn’t happen. We’ve done that before."</p><p>"Doesn’t seem like the healthiest move, emotionally," Troy observed. Abed shrugged.</p><hr/><p>A couple minutes later they went back out into the big sitting room connected to the open kitchen, the one with the fireplace that Jeff variously thought of as Hawthorne House’s living room, dining room, and lobby. Craig, Ian, Chang, and Elroy were sitting around the dining table, some board game Jeff had never heard of spread out between them.</p><p>"So I trade the six units of mutton for four units of rye, which gives me enough rye to get a berth to Australia, and I put my mother-in-law on it for six victory points!" Chang was saying, a note of triumph in his voice, when the men all turned to see Jeff, Troy, and Abed.</p><p>"What’s going on?" Ian asked them. "I feel like we’ve missed out on something."</p><p>"I’m winning, is what’s going on," Chang told him.</p><p>"Yeah," Jeff began. He tried to come up with a good way to explain that wouldn’t lead to a bunch of further questions, particularly from Craig. "The galaxy is spinning through the cosmos on a trajectory set by the Big Bang, and similarly, we—"</p><p>A squeak that might have been a swallowed attempt to say his name came from the far end of the lobby. Annie was there, flanked by Frankie and Shirley, her eyes big as dinner plates at the sight of him.</p><p>"I mean," Annie said, blinking a lot, "there you are, Jeff."</p><p>"Yeah," he said slowly. "Hi."</p><p>There was a long pause while they stared at each other from across the wide room.</p><p>"You okay?" he asked, eventually.</p><p>She seemed surprised by the question. "Yeah," she said. She took a step towards him, then stopped. "You?"</p><p>"I was feeling kind of tired," he lied. "Thought I should just head out." He jerked a thumb in the general direction of the driveway.</p><p>Annie made what was either a disappointed sound or a credible attempt at faking a disappointed sound out of empathy. "Oh, okay."</p><p>"Yeah, so, uh, I guess I’ll see you…"</p><p>"Tomorrow?" Jeff couldn't tell whether she was hopeful or dreading it. She seemed upset, either way. He'd upset her.</p><p>"Sure. I mean, maybe. Probably not. I tend to sleep in on Sundays, and…"</p><p>"Oh, sure. I mean, I’ll be back soon. Sometime."</p><p>"Great. I mean, it was great to see you."</p><p>"You, too."</p><p>"I mean that."</p><p>"So do I."</p><p>"You're very important to me…"</p><p>Annie and Jeff stared at one another for another long moment. Troy and Abed and Shirley and Frankie and Elroy and Chang and Craig and Ian Duncan all exchanged expressions ranging from baffled to concerned to irritated that something was holding up the board game.</p><p>"I still have your jacket on," Annie said suddenly.</p><p>"Keep it!" Jeff said brightly, which he regretted immediately because that leather jacket was probably the nicest garment he still owned, and left before he could say anything else he regretted.</p><p>A half second after the front door closed, Britta emerged from a hallway. She had her phone in her hand and the distracted air of someone who’d gotten caught up in their phone while in the restroom. "Hey, guys," she said uncertainly to the assembled crowd. "So, we gonna have that lasagna?"</p><p>
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<a name="section0011"><h2>11. You Say Tomato</h2></a>
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    <p>Obviously Troy pulled her aside and explained to Annie what Jeff's understanding of their encounter had been, pretty quick. Rattled, she decided to just let it drop. Once she was safely back in DC, she'd call him, maybe in a few days. They'd be awkward for a little while and then, she was sure, they would recover from the bobble (yet again) and just be friends, right and proper friends, who lived two time zones apart.</p><p>So she politely rejected everybody's offers to intervene on her behalf, ranging from assuring Abed that he didn't need to drive Annie on a breakneck race against time to Jeff's apartment, to scooping Britta's phone out of her hand and telling her that when Annie had said not to text Jeff about it, Annie had meant it. Instead she focused on everybody else, her family-of-choice who enjoyed her company so much more than her family-of-circumstance. They watched an episode of the newest <em> Inspector Spacetime </em> series, the one where the Inspector is trapped on a 27th-century space colony that looks an awful lot like an abandoned shopping mall, and they had s'mores and lasagna and vegetarian lasagna and eventually Annie had that appletini. It was a good time, and if Jeff had been sitting next to her throughout it making snarky little asides and smiling at her, it wouldn't have been <em> that much </em> better. She rested her head on Shirley's shoulder instead, which was fine, and went to bed a little before everybody else, because she was still on Eastern time.</p><p>She woke up before everybody else, too, and took a languorous shower before dressing in her most comfy-yet-stylish air travel garb and heading downstairs to find coffee and breakfast. Coffee and breakfast and, sitting on a barstool by the high kitchen counter, Jeff Winger.</p><p>"Morning," he said affably, like it was perfectly normal for them both to be in Troy's mansion's kitchen early on a Sunday morning. He was sipping a cup of coffee—no, a latte he'd made using the kitchen's espresso machine.</p><p>"Hi," she said cautiously, weighing the pros and cons of just throwing something at him because dammit, dealing with his bullshit was not something she'd planned on doing today; and also dammit, she was still glad to see him because she'd been bummed she only got a few hours with him the day before; and <em> also </em> also dammit, she had spent a lot of that time together yesterday trying not to send the wrong signals and then afterwards she'd found out that they hadn't even been the wrong signals…</p><p>"I'd offer you coffee, but the machine only makes one cup at a time, so…" He shrugged. Just when she had about decided that he was going to just pretend the scene last night hadn't happened, his face suddenly grew serious. "Can we talk about yesterday?"</p><hr/><p>Jeff eyed her warily. Annie looked pensive, like she would have preferred to just go on pretending that nothing had happened, that he hadn't kissed her. Or maybe she was concerned that somebody would pop in, Britta or Abed or little Ben, and interrupt or overhear. But then she nodded. "I think we should."</p><p>He smiled gratefully before catching himself. "Great."</p><p>"You can make me a cup of coffee while we do," she decided. "I'll be…way over here."</p><p>He rose and started the process of making her a latte in the machine. "So," he began, then paused because he still wasn't sure what the best approach was. When he had a chance, he turned to look at her, and was chagrined to see that she'd sat down at the far end of the counter, about as far from him as she could be.</p><p>"I thought this would be safest," she said solemnly when she saw his reaction.</p><hr/><p>"Sure," he said, and she winced, because her attempt at a self-deprecating joke (<em>look, I better be all the way over here so I don't accidentally lunge for you and kiss you again</em>) had plainly misfired. "So," he said again, before she could correct, "listen. You're very important to me, Annie. I want you to have every happiness in the world, to fly and soar and other avian metaphors about freedom. You're amazing and you're going to do amazing things. You know that, you don't need me to say it."</p><p>She was a little taken aback, because it wasn't often that Jeff had ever been so forthright. "I, well. I do like hearing it, though," she said shyly. "And I just meant, you know…" She struggled to find a way to explain about the joke. "It would be easier with a little distance between us."</p><p>"Yes." He nodded, relieved. "I don't want to be in your way. I don't want you to miss out on anything, on my account."</p><p>Just when she'd thought for a moment that they were on the same page. "I won't!" she cried. "I mean, I wouldn't. You're important to me, too, you know."</p><hr/><p>The espresso machine beeped and Jeff had to add the milk. "Thanks," he said after a moment. "Maybe if we weren't in such different places." She in DC, him in Colorado…</p><p>"You don't think we can bridge that gap?" she asked wistfully.</p><p>"I'd love for that to be true," Jeff said while he watched the milk foamer make the milk foam. "But there's a lot of evidence supporting us keeping it at a distance. I...we're great at hurting each other."</p><p>"We're great at a lot of things, Jeff. That's why we're such a good team. Do you really want to just let that go?"</p><p>Annie's words hung in the air for a moment as Jeff processed them. She was misunderstanding him, he realized. He'd been arguing against trying to pursue a long-distance relationship, and she thought he was making the case against maintaining their friendship, with all the baggage between them. For the second time in two days, he'd assumed too much.</p><p>"I guess not," he said, when he realized he'd been silent for too long. He tried to lighten the mood a little. "I mean, I'll always need someone I can call when I need a refresher on the difference between puff paint and the other kind, or the kinds of markers."</p><p>"I like to think I have more to offer than opinions on poster-making supplies," Annie responded a little huffily, "but okay. Good."</p><p>He was combining milk and espresso into a latte in a cup for her and then she was suddenly there, in his personal space, arms around him. "I missed you when we weren't talking, you know," she said as she hugged him fiercely. His arms were around her already, hugging her back, before he knew what was happening. If he hadn't been more than a foot taller than her, or if they hadn't both been standing, he might have tried to kiss her, before he knew what was happening.</p><p>She couldn't see his expression, which was probably a good thing. "I missed you, too," he said thickly to the top of her head. "I…" He forced himself to quit before he said something he'd regret, something that might drive a further wedge between them. He was her friend, he reminded himself. She'd made it clear, she didn't consider him a romantic prospect. That ship had sailed, years ago now probably. Him assuming otherwise had led to their disastrous argument, this past August.</p><hr/><p>When Jeff trailed off, Annie looked up, concerned. There was a tightness around his eyes she knew all too well, the expression he assumed when he was trying to ignore something unpleasant. Which unpleasant thing was he trying to ignore this time? Their age difference? The time zone problem? Or had she misunderstood, and he was not that into her, after all, and trying to let her down easy? Or maybe she'd just hurt him too badly, when she'd dropped the news about her new job back in August. She'd dropped it like a cartoon anvil on his foot, after all, nary a thought of how it would affect him.</p><p>"Jeff, I…" She trailed off, too, because she had no idea what to say to reassure him, since she didn't know what he thought the problem was, and then she felt herself tensing up and she could feel his arms around her tensing up to match, and they were just staring at each other uneasily for what felt like an eternity but was probably just a few seconds.</p><p>"Let me drive you to the airport this afternoon," he finally said.</p><p>"Oh, that'd be great," she said without thinking. She'd have to tell Troy and Abed she didn't need them to drive her after all, but they'd understand.</p><p>Then the TV turned on, making both of them jump. Over at the far end of the great room, little Ben was scrolling through cartoons on Netflix.</p><p>"He comes down here because if he turns on the TV outside Shirley's room he wakes her up," Jeff explained.</p><p>Annie slipped out of his arms, nodded. She watched silently as Ben abruptly turned and ran towards them, seeming unconcerned that they were there. </p><p>"Breakfast!"'</p><p>"Ben," Jeff said evenly. "Is that how we ask for things?"</p><p>Ben groaned theatrically. "May I please have breakfast?"</p><p>While Jeff got out a bowl of dry cereal and a glass of milk, Annie marveled at how much Ben had grown. And how comfortable Jeff seemed, dealing with him. Comfortable, and mature, and...extremely sexy. Annie observed, rapt, as Jeff and Ben chatted about <em> Veggietales </em> for a minute or so, then Ben carried his breakfast back towards the television. And Jeff, smiling and more relaxed than he'd been when Annie was hugging him, turned back to her, seemingly totally unaware of the impact this 'compassionate paternal Jeff Winger' act was having on her.</p><hr/><p>Annie was looking at him oddly.</p><p>"You okay?" he asked after she didn't say anything for a moment.</p><p>"Yeah," she said slowly. "Yeah. You want to, I don't know, go for a walk? I haven't seen…are there grounds? I was told Hawthorne House has <em> grounds </em>."</p><p>"Sure," he said, and they went for a walk.</p><p>As soon as they were out the door Annie started talking about some <em> Zootopia </em> fan-written story she'd read, where Nick the fox went out to Bunnyburrow with Judy to meet her bunny parents, and the parents were concerned about their daughter dating a fox, because they wanted bunny grandchildren, and Annie didn't think the story properly took into account the fact that Judy had literally dozens of bunny siblings, at least some of whom presumably had families of their own, so surely even if Judy was their favorite they ought to just be happy she found love, even if it was with a fox, and what did Jeff think of the premise?</p><p>Jeff was distracted by thoughts of grabbing Annie and kissing her again. Instead he kept his distance as they walked around the edges of the estate together. When she sat down on a stone bench tucked away in a little flower-filled gable, he sat down on the other bench opposite her, rather than next to her on the same bench. And the conversation drifted from <em> Zootopia </em> to other, more grounded topics, until Jeff was rehashing a case he was working on with Mark, where two guys who were in business together operating a couple of MRI imaging centers in the Greendale area each decided the other was screwing him out of profits, and how things had broken down to the point where one of the guys had locked everybody out of both of the businesses and the other had broken in and stolen—or confiscated, stolen was a loaded term—a bunch of sports memorabilia from the first guy's office, and the judge hearing the contract dispute had been really irritated when sports memorabilia valuation entered the picture and it had been Jeff's job to smooth things over so that their guy was willing to return the other guy's signed football stadium seat.</p><p>"What I'm hearing is that you're managing to find ways to bring the spirit of Greendale to your new work," Annie said. This seemed to please her. "But, um…" She stood up suddenly, and sat down again just as quickly, this time next to him on the other stone bench. "When I jumped up yesterday," she began. "Troy told me…"</p><p>Jeff swallowed, and tried to keep the conversation moving, when she just trailed off and stared into space next to him. "Heh, yeah. I shouldn't have done that."</p><p>She turned to him, nonplussed. "What?"</p><p>He needed to apologize, to move forward. "I wasn't thinking. It was just, I was happy to see you, but I know—"</p><p>"Jeff," she said sharply. "It's okay."</p><p>"I know," he said. She was, of course, able to take it in stride, just like he'd known she would. "You're amazing, you know that?"</p><p>Annie squinted at him, nonplussed again for some reason. "What?"</p><p>"Sorry, was I unclear before when I had all those avian metaphors?" Jeff asked her.</p><p>"Don't get me wrong, I like this new thing where you compliment me every few minutes. A girl could get used to that. But I don't—listen. I kissed you."</p><p>Jeff was baffled. "Huh?"</p><p>Annie stood, throwing her hands up in a gesture of dramatic exasperation and turning away from him. "Yesterday, when you kissed me? I kissed you. I mean, I thought I did. I thought I kissed you and then you jumped back and I panicked and ran away. Troy told me that you thought you kissed me. And then I panicked and ran away. So," she said, wringing her hands, "that would be a difference."</p><p>"Oh." Jeff tried to process this.</p><p>She turned back towards him as he rose to his feet, then looked away again. "I kissed you on purpose," she said, "and I'd like to kiss you more, but, you know, I have a flight in a few hours."</p><p>"I think we could kiss again without you missing your flight. If I'm forewarned I'll remember to break the kiss off after a couple of hours."</p><p>"Jeff!" Annie spun around. "I'm warning you, I don't want to miss my flight."</p><p>She was stern enough that he realized she thought it was a possibility, on some level: that he would just start kissing her and not stop until suppertime and she would miss her flight and lose her job and have to move into their mansion they co-owned with their friends and just have no choice but to be with him always. "Okay," he said, taking a step towards her. She straightened up at his approach but didn't back away.</p><hr/><p>The next few hours were a blur. She’d actually received a tour of the grounds the morning before. Thus she knew about this spot, well out of view of the house, with the stone benches, and flowers raggedly coming up all around, bare concrete pedestals where fancy stone planters had once been, and climbing vines that wrapped tendrils to embrace a wooden gable. They needed someone to take up gardening or else Troy would have to hire someone to maintain it all, she’d said at the time, but even then she’d made note of a good place to tryst, if she were ever in a position to tryst. And barely a day later there they were, him towering over her, bent down, his hands holding her head until he grunted with frustration and picked her up (firmly but gently, as though she were some exotic potted flower, one hand under her, the other steadying) and lifted her up and set her down again atop one of the low concrete planter stands, so that her eyes and his were at the same height.</p><p>She remembered making a little mew of disappointment when he’d started to pull away, and he’d obliged her by not letting go of her after all, and then her hands were sliding along his skin under his shirt and jacket, which were getting all bunched up.</p><p>It wasn’t the first time they’d kissed, obviously. It wasn’t even the first time they’d kissed that weekend. But the event of the day before, triggered by a paired impulse in them both, had been over and done in a few seconds once reality set in. The last time before that had been when he’d driven her to the airport the first time, almost a year ago now, a quick peck to solemnize an unspoken agreement. Before that there had been their kiss when he’d found out she was leaving and he'd reacted so much more strongly she'd expected, and the whole strange week after, when they’d somehow decided to put off kisses until after her trip. Before that…</p><p>Well, here she was, back from her trip, and here they were. </p><p>But Annie had an alarm on her phone reminding her when she needed to be heading to the airport, with plenty of lead time to account for traffic and for the possibility that she would need to wheedle Troy and Abed into the car by reframing it as a potential car chase or secret mission or magical quest, or something.</p><p>So when her phone buzzed, she stood up quickly but didn’t panic. "I need to get my suitcase and get to the airport," she told Jeff. He looked miffed, like maybe he thought if he kissed her enough she would change her mind, or maybe he just liked kissing her and resented needing to stop.</p><p>"God, there’s going to be questions," he said then, and she realized his miffed-ness wasn’t related to her. He was reacting to the scenario already unspooling in his head where he spent the next phase of his life constantly peppered with questions from Troy and Abed and Britta and Shirley and probably Frankie and Craig and Chang (Elroy, at least, wouldn’t care). Annie would at least be insulated from them by virtue of being on the other side of the country. Though the next time she spoke to any of them…</p><p>"I don’t want to have to talk to any of them about us," she said. "But I have to—Jeff, what are we going to do?"</p><p>Jeff scowled. "Dammit. Yeah. Okay. You go back to the house, pack or whatever. I’ll get to my car, pull out, drive around the block, come back."</p><p>"No," Annie said. "Because then, why are you here giving me a ride—stop it, you, that wasn’t a double entendre—"</p><p>"I didn’t—"</p><p>"I was talking to myself," she snapped. She wasn’t mad at him, of course, but this was a frustrating and confounding situation to have mired herself in. "I mean, why are you picking me up—taking me for a—oh, everything sounds—ugh!"</p><p>"Troy and Abed were going to take you to the airport, they said," Jeff suggested. "They can just do it. I’ll leave, I won’t come back until after you’re gone, a little bit of time goes by and everybody quickly becomes less invested in hounding us as the novelty of the situation wears off."</p><p>"Yes. Yes!" Annie cried. "I love you," she added without thinking, and winced. "I mean, you just provided a very workable solution to a problem that was vexing me, I didn’t—"</p><p>"It’s okay," he said, all smugly and handsomely calm. Why wasn’t he freaking out a little? She was freaking out a little.</p><p>"Why aren’t you freaking out a little? I’m—"</p><p>"You’re freaking out a little for both of us. I am a tower of grounded, stable majesty. We’re each playing to our strengths."</p><p>"You once had a panic attack because I said I didn’t like your haircut," she retorted. Then she threw herself at him and tried to kiss him and did, which, it was good that he cooperated because with their height difference all he had to do to stop her was <em> not </em> bend down when she needed him to.</p><p>"I should go, I have a bunch of packing," she said after not nearly long enough.</p><p>"Yes, okay, have fun. I know you like packing under pressure," he said, and the way he said it sounded extremely dirty.</p><p> </p><p>NEXT: BRITTA ORATES! ANNIE CONFESSES!</p><p>
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<a name="section0012"><h2>12. My Bonnie Lies Over the Sea</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>This is a little shorter than usual, because what was going to be the other scene in this chapter didn't seem like a good fit tonally. More wacky comedy next chapter! Probably.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Sometime during the flight back to the east coast the initial buzz wore off. Annie wore a coat of giddy joy for hours. Shirley and Troy and everybody had been polite enough not to say anything, though surely someone must have noticed. She sat in her middle-row seat two-thirds of the way back in the big, crowded airplane, and stared off into space, and remembered and fantasized and grinned at nothing, for more than half the flight.</p><p>Then, after she’d been alone with her thoughts for so long, doubt set in. She should have brought a book or something.</p><p>There was a lot--so much! So much that they had left unsaid. Maybe they weren't on the same page about it. Looking over their history, that seemed pretty likely. More than once Annie had decided they were in love and Jeff just needed a little push to realize it. The last time, the final time, she had concocted an elaborate plan that had gone down in flames. Flames, and the absurd phrase "platonic shoulder holding."</p><p>She'd been working on another route, because she wasn't a quitter, when he overdosed and proposed to another woman in the same month, and at that point she'd decided she'd had enough, and she'd been done. It had been over, for almost two years. Two years with a couple of little splashes of exception, but they'd been little splashes. He'd been out of her life…</p><p>And then, suddenly, they were talking regularly again and it was like getting back something she'd become inured to doing without. Like he was her severed arm or something that had become reattached and she'd spent all that time learning to write left-handed and now she didn't need to any more.</p><p>Being in the same places he was, that had been intoxicating. He smiled at her and all she wanted to do was curl up in his lap, or at his feet, and bring him drinks and laugh at his jokes and wriggle happily when he petted her. That wasn't healthy, was it?</p><p>Annie reviewed her female friendships. Britta had her Blade stories, and it was hard to judge from Annie's vantage but she also seemed kind of hung up on Troy. They'd slept together several times since Troy's return to Colorado, Annie knew, and it was easy to imagine Troy had casually decided that he and Britta could be casual lovers, friends-with-benefits, and Britta had gone along with it because she wanted to please Troy, the same way she'd gone along with it to please Troy when Abed had decided that Britta and Troy needed to break up. That wasn't quite an accurate description of the event, Annie knew, but however you sliced it, Britta hadn't been the person making the choices, she'd been the person passively accepting the choices made for her. The same (or so it seemed to Annie) as when Britta and Jeff had started sleeping together, and the same as when they'd quit.</p><p>Annie shook her head, annoyed with herself. Her understanding of Britta's romantic history was all tangled up in Annie's resentment of Britta and Jeff having ever been a thing. Shirley, now… Shirley more than once had confided in Annie about her ex-husband's power over her. Even now, Annie wondered if Shirley would be able to resist if Andre were to call her up, invite her out to Portland or Seattle or wherever he'd ended up, Shirley's career and their kids and Andre's girlfriend all be damned.</p><p>Frankie was a closed book. She had once told Annie about how, years ago, she had been in a relationship with a person whose first name began with a P, and for that relationship she had declined more than one career opportunity. Eventually P. had left her for a younger woman. Frankie had intended that as a cautionary tale, though the lack of detail had blunted its impact.</p><p>The friends she'd made since moving to DC…there was Heather, Josh’s ex he’d been on good terms with. She had pretty unambiguously revealed herself to be Josh's friend first and Annie's friend a distant second. Social media suggested that Heather had only become her friend the better to gauge when to shove Annie out of the way and reclaim Josh for herself, but maybe that was unfair. The other women in that friend group, none of them had been interested in keeping in touch once word got out Annie and Josh were over. Even if Annie had, in retrospect, never felt much for Josh and shouldn't have strung him along as much as she had, it still stung a bit. She'd thought of Heather as a friend.</p><p>But wasn't that consistent with the pattern? Josh and Heather broke up, remained friends. Josh had always intimated that he'd dumped Heather, not that it had been the other way around or even a mutual decision. Then Josh met Annie. Josh and Annie dated for a half a year. Annie dumped Josh, and then Josh snapped his fingers and Heather came running.</p><p>What if Jeff snapped his fingers? What if he called her tonight, or tomorrow, or the day after, and demanded she quit her job and move back home to him?</p><p>He wouldn’t, of course. But what if he gently suggested it as an option? Or if he didn’t reject the idea when she tentatively raised it as a wouldn’t-it-be-silly-if hypothetical? Because how could she resist doing that? The sentence would sit there on her tongue, locked and loaded and ready to fire, every time she spoke to him. It was like trying not to think of a pink elephant: a losing game.</p><p>Last year when she’d told him about her job he had rejected the idea of a long-distance relationship so completely and so quickly, before she’d even finished beginning to articulate the concept, that in retrospect she was pretty sure it hadn’t even occurred to him as an option. He was manifestly in a better place now, with his legal work and his mansion-commune and his apparent willingness to act <em> in loco parentis </em> for Shirley’s kindergartener as needed, not to mention his workout routine he’d obviously kept up. But he was still Jeff Winger.</p><p>He was still Jeff Winger, and she was still Annie Edison, and if he snapped his fingers she’d come running, and then… Annie imagined Shirley, Frankie, even Britta all shaking their heads sadly, clucking their tongues. <em> We tried to warn you</em>.</p>
<hr/><p>"Hey." Annie kept her voice casual.</p><p>"Hey." Jeff sounded guardedly casual, too.</p><p>"I made it home. Not <em> home</em>-home," she added quickly. "Here-home. My apartment." She winced, because she could hear how anxious she sounded.</p><p>"Good, good." If he could hear how anxious she sounded he wasn't acknowledging it. "Thanks for calling. Long day of travel. It's, what, after eleven there, right?"</p><p>"Yeah. I should go to bed, I have work in the morning, but I wanted to call you. You know, we didn't really talk about…you know."</p><p>She heard him sigh. "Yeah."</p><p>"I mean, I'm young, I can miss some sleep and I'll be fine," Annie said, to her own mild horror.</p><p>"Right."</p><p>"Not that you're old," she added, trying to fix it. "And anyway it's only nine thirty where you are."</p><p>"Not quite my bedtime," Jeff agreed. He sounded tired, though.</p><p>"Jeff… This feels really awkward." Annie's voice was low, almost a whisper. "I don't want to have messed anything up. Did we mess up?"</p><p>Another tired sigh. "I hope not. I don't want to make things harder for you."</p><p>"Harder for me?"  Annie struggled to keep her tone even.</p><p>"You’re in your twenties," he said simply. "You’re in a new city, you’re starting your career, every weekend is another party or road trip. You’re dating guys with names like Josh and Tyler, I assume."</p><p>"I broke up with Josh and I don’t know a Tyler," Annie said. Actually, no, she did know a Tyler, he was in the receiving room at work and he was old enough to be Jeff’s father. That wasn’t important. "Is this you complaining about how you’re not in your twenties any more, again?"</p><p>"No," he said shortly, like he too was remembering his breakdown the night she’d told them about the internship. "I’m okay with where I am. With any luck my next semester teaching at Greendale will be my last. I’ve got people who care about me, I care about them… But where I am, it’s not where you are."</p><p>"It could be," Annie said, though she wasn’t sure whether he meant being in Colorado or being in his forties.</p><p>"I don’t want to do that to you, though. Drag you back. The point of letting you go, is you go. I know, I know, you should be the one to make the decision for yourself," he continued, before she could object. "I have given this, I have given <em> you </em> a lot of thought today. The last month. The last year. Since we graduated the first time. Since we were freshmen together..."</p><p>"We were <em> frosh,</em>" Annie said teasingly, and somehow she could hear him smile. "Learn the lingo. So you don’t want to move out here? Learn a new transit system, all these exciting bars with local artisanal microbrews?"</p><p>"I can’t. That’s not true. I could. I could if I had to. If you look at me and simper breathlessly. I would do it if you asked me to. I wouldn’t be able to refuse. But I’m asking you not to do that. I’m saying it would be a mistake."</p><p>"And you’re not snapping your fingers, for me to drop what I’m doing and come running?"</p><p>"Would that work?" He seemed surprised at the thought, for some reason. "No, I’m not. My advice, as your lawyer, is to keep on the track you’ve carved for yourself. Don’t jump it for my sake."</p><p>"Jeff," she said, but she didn’t have anything ready to follow it up with. She should have been ready to refute him, to throw some of his words back in his face, to remind him that she could keep up with him. Instead she felt blank and tired and she didn’t know exactly what she even wanted to tell him.</p><p>"And don’t haul some old—some dashing man of an indeterminate early middle-age, don’t drag me out. You’d just be disappointed by how little I wanted to go on weekend road trips and visit weird dive bars and see exotic arthouse movies, like <em> Zootopia </em>. I wouldn’t want to disappoint you."</p><p>Annie frowned. "You act like you know what I want, and that it isn’t something you can give me." If she didn’t know what she wanted, how could he? And whatever she wanted, she was pretty sure Jeff was capable of providing it. Jeff, with his ease with Ben and his desire to be honest with her and his arms and the way they had held her...</p><p>"I know," he said, before she could slip into a reverie of very recent memories. "Maybe neither of those things are true. But I don’t want to take the chance I’m right. Better you stay where you are, I stay where I am, and we…" He trailed off.</p><p>"We what, Jeff? We talk on the phone until one of us meets somebody new and then we taper it off, until the next time we’re both single, if we’re ever both single again, and then maybe when I’m forty-three and you’re fifty-nine we reevaluate? And then finally we’re together and we share the rest of our lives, but it’s just the rest of your life—"</p><p>"Annie," he protested, but she was on a roll.</p><p>"Because in twenty years, you’ll—I only get to have you for half the time that—That’s dumb!" Annie tried to think of something brilliant to say, something that would make Jeff change his mind, and decide he wanted to abandon his budding legal career and move away from his loved ones to her. Or decide that he should convince her to abandon her budding forensics career and give up trying to succeed in a strange city all on her own, and move back to him. "It’s late," she said instead, "and I’m tired."</p><p>"You were traveling all day and you have work in the morning," Jeff agreed.</p><p>"Maybe I’ll stay up another three hours watching the Disney Channel," Annie grumped. "You’re not the boss of me."</p><p>"No," Jeff replied. He sounded old and tired. "I’m not."</p><p>"Well. Good night, Jeff. We’ll talk about this later," she told him. She sounded angrier than she’d meant to. "I'm sorry this turned out awkward after all, I guess that was inevitable. Kissing you was really, really nice," she said, softer. "I'm glad we did that."</p><p>A weak chuckle. "Me too." </p><p>"I wish we were doing more of it right now."</p><p>"Me, too."</p><p>After they’d hung up, Annie wondered: if she took her top off and texted him a picture, would that maybe change his mind? Josh had hinted a couple of times, fished for that. She’d always ignored it.</p><p>She went into the bathroom and took a quick shower. Then she got as far as taking a dozen pictures of herself in the mirror and looking through them, just to see. It wasn’t more than a minute or two before she gave up trying to find one where her expression was sultry instead of self-conscious, and deleted all the photos and went to bed.</p><p><br/>
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  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Thanks, as per usual, to Bethanyactually and Amrywiol for beta reading. Also thank you for reading this! If you liked it, comment or leave kudos or something...it might just change your life for the better if you do.</p>
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